Driving up Highland Street toward Loomis Place, you may notice that the drab concrete retaining wall holding up Foote's community garden has exploded into a bright palette of teal, red, purple, green, blue, yellow and black. It is a new mural, painted collaboratively by ninth graders over several class periods this fall.
The mural's bold colors and simple designs create an arresting and highly visible piece of public art on Foote's campus. What is not immediately visible, at least to the casual viewer, are the stories layered onto this canvas: each rectangular section of the mural represents the unique identity of one of the 26 ninth graders who created it.
"We were trying to come up with a new ninth grade curriculum that would be more relevant to students, and not just focus on a bunch of white guys and the history of western art," explains Foote's art educator, Mike Golschneider. So Mike and Art Chair Karla Matheny turned to the art of Keith Haring, the late New York muralist, graffiti artist and gay rights activist whose artistic style—bold lines, vivid colors and active figures—won him worldwide acclaim.
Each ninth grader was a assigned a rectangle that was pre-painted with one of four background colors that recall Haring's artistic style. Mike and Karla then instructed students to fill in their space with symbols and imagery that reflect their cultural, racial and personal identities, using only five colors.
"We are trying to keep the mural cohesive so it reads correctly from the road," says Mike, himself an experienced mural painter. Mike earned his bachelor of arts with a concentration in mural painting from Central Connecticut State University and has been commissioned to paint murals all over Connecticut (as well as in Nicaragua). He just completed a new mural in Durham, Connecticut that depicts the town's history—from prehistory to an as-yet-unknown future.
As he's describing the Foote mural unit, he offers encouragement and assistance to the students. "David, the black line looks good, dude!"
The symbols and figures on the mural run the gamut from trees, UFOs, houses and the gender symbol for female, to more enigmatic imagery. One student's rectangle depicts a thought bubble filled with a jumble of bright colors. "It symbolizes my creativity and thoughts," he explains. Another student's section shows a civil rights fist set inside a sunflower, which is set inside a moon. "I chose a sunflower because it's a strong flower that always tries to face the sun, and that's how I try to look at life," she explains. "I painted the moon because it's mysterious and there are two sides of it. The civil rights fist, it's just what I like to learn about in history. It's a really important cause to me."
In another section, a female student painted a self-portrait that is holding a sign which reads, 'daughter of an immigrant.' "My father immigrated here from El Salvador. I painted my heart as the Salvadoran flag," she explains. Other symbols are sprinkled throughout her self-portrait: a rainbow to symbolize happiness, the Chinese symbol for tall and the word 'chance.' "Chance is my favorite word because it is open-ended," the student says. "Like, you have a chance of doing anything."
The mural dovetails with the work the ninth graders are doing in their Comparative Cultures class. Early in the school year, each ninth grader interviews an adult of a different race, ethnicity or religion from themselves. "The student interviewers ask their subjects about how those aspects of their cultural identity have shaped their lives: which parts of their identity they are really proud of, and which parts have been challenging," says Deb Riding, Middle School Humanities Co-Chair.
This year, Deb added a new twist: prior to interviewing adults, the students interviewed each other about their own cultural identities. For many students, it was a challenging exercise because they hadn't deeply considered their own identity, or lacked the vocabulary to express what they felt. That's part of the reason for doing it, Deb says: to develop the students' senses of self and empathy by nudging them outside their comfort zones.
"We are asking the people they interview to do this, so we think it's important for students to experience how it feels," says Deb.
The mural project was also born out of the ninth graders' study of prehistoric cave paintings. Mike and Karla saw parallels between the ancient cave drawings and modern-day graffiti produced by artists like Haring, and recognized it as an opportunity to create an authentic connection for students. As the ninth graders now move into studying medieval art, the identity work will continue, albeit indirectly.
"We are going to create ceramic gargoyles who are going to sit on the garden wall and protect our identities," says Karla. "Kind of like the medieval gargoyles protected the churches."
As the years go on, Mike envisions future ninth grade classes expanding the mural along the concrete wall, creating a powerful representation of Foote School's oldest students as they came to better understand their own stories, and the unique gifts that they could share with the world.
