NATO Reveals Street Mural in Lithuania: Stand Under Our Umbrella

Vilnius, Lithuania's capital city, is home to an extensive collection of street art. Beautifully painted images surprise both locals and foreigners, showing everything from a jacked Albert Einstein (complete with an E = MC2 shoulder tattoo) to a kitten on a bookshelf with titles by Lithuanian authors. Since January, the Vilnius street art gallery has a new acquisition: NATO's first-ever officially commissioned mural.

The "Protect the Future" mural depicts episodes of everyday life. Individuals and small groups of people gather to play sports, socialise and have fun in a public park. Over them is a blue-striped umbrella branded with NATO's compass, symbolising how NATO protects people all across the Alliance and helps them feel safe and free to live their lives as they choose.

"We wanted to paint about freedom and what it means to people, but to visualise something like this is a huge task," said Žygimantas. "So we asked ourselves what freedom is about and we agreed that it all came down to feeling safe, being able to carry out our daily tasks and being with our family and friends. That is what holds the most value for people and the direction we wanted to go for."

Throughout the course of three days, Žygimantas and partner artists from the "Living Graphics" art collective endured freezing cold weather to paint the mural.

"It was quite a challenge because the weather conditions make it difficult to paint in winter. Any water-based paint would freeze instantly, so we had to resort to spray cans. We used a couple hundred cans and we had to paint with both hands to maximise time, but we enjoyed seeing the public reaction to the whole process. We were painting in front of a beautiful park and we saw many people passing by taking photos."

One of the highlights of NATO's "Protect the Future" campaign, the mural that currently adorns the historical building at Pylimo Street 9, in Vilnius Old Town, was commissioned by NATO to celebrate the fruitful collaboration with Lithuania when it hosted the NATO Summit in July 2023.

"It's my hope that the mural will resonate not only with the people of Vilnius but across Lithuania, encapsulating the nation's NATO membership and emphasising the Alliance's enduring importance to our future," said Marie-Doha Besancenot, NATO Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy. "As we look ahead towards the 75th anniversary of the founding of NATO this year, we hope that this is the first of many murals that commemorate NATO's mission across the Alliance."

In 2023, the "Protect the Future" campaign focused on engaging with youth across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, with popular Lithuanian blogger and YouTube star Paulius Mikolaitis (known as Paul de Miko). Since the start of Paulius' involvement in the campaign, he has had the opportunity to attend some of the most important events in the NATO calendar, including the Vilnius Summit and the "Baltic Operations 23" military exercise. Born in Lithuania, Paulius emphasised the importance of introducing youth to NATO's activities, stating, "The mural in Vilnius Old Town serves as a symbol, reinforcing Lithuania's NATO membership and the role it plays in protecting all our futures."

Pictured: Paulius posts about NATO's mural on his personal Instagram account. In the text, Paulius jokes "The official representative of NAFO presents the @NATO mural and invites everyone to see it up." NAFO stands for North Atlantic Fella Association, a group of social media users dedicated to fundraising for defenders of Ukraine and countering disinformation online.

About the artist

Žygimantas Amelynas was born and raised in Kaunas, Lithuania's second-largest city. In his first years as an Applied Graphics university student, Žygimantas became enamoured by street art and, particularly, by the idea of turning cities into open-air galleries by covering old buildings with thought-provoking images.

Now with a 15-year-long career as a professional muralist, Žygimantas looks back at his first steps in the field with nostalgia.

"I actually got my first job through my father. He was a broker and he put me in contact with a restaurant that wanted a mural. I was new to mural painting, and this was my first step into this whole sphere. From that experience, I learned that I wanted to transform public spaces into art."

In his creations, Žygimantas celebrates people, emotions and the human experience. Žygimantas's aesthetic is bold and colourful and it often features large-scale portraits and intense facial expressions. A key part of his creative process is to understand the context of a site, learning about the history of buildings and the communities who live or once lived in that location.

Arguably Žygimantas's most well-known work, the 'Old Wise Man' (2013) is an enormous mural that pays tribute to the Kaunas-born modern artist, Jurgis Maciunas, who put Lithuanian art on the map in the mid-20th century. Painted on the side of an old footwear factory, the mural is composed of a barefoot giant wearing a red bodysuit and smoking an enormous pipe.

The first public large-scale mural in Lithuania, the Old Wise Man contributed to the change in public perception of street art in the Baltic country.

"The Old Wise Man is the most important artwork I have done," explains Žygimantas. "It was the first widely noticed mural in my country and, at the time, the perception of urban art wasn't very positive. There was this idea of graffiti as vandalism. But with the Old Wise Man work, people saw how street art can transform places and started to appreciate it more. Today, people from other cities even come to visit it."

See other works of Žygimantas Amelynas in this photo gallery: