Project Inspiration
Before getting this job, I was thinking about how to approach group murals. I knew I wanted to give some creative freedom to each person but also wanted to maintain visual cohesion and unity. How could we have both?
Apollo Ridge High School Cafeteria Mural
An exciting solution came while on a walk. From far away, let viewers only see a single image but walk closer and see many camouflaged images (examples below). It was even more satisfying to think of the single image as a question, and about those hidden images–each one as a student’s answer to the question.
So then which question would the mural depict? I proposed two to students: “What are you curious about?” and “Where should we go for wisdom?” We dialogued about both questions and discussed how those answers lent themselves to visual representation.
In the end, when it came time to decide which set of question-and-answers we would paint, of a total of around 70 students, two voted one way, 68 the other. Brave, those two. In the end it seemed the curiosity question had more varied, interesting answers and those answers would be illustratable.
On Curiosity
Below are some thoughts on curiosity, a key concept that links the arts and play to learning and development, which is one of my focuses. One of the ways I introduced the project was by opening the concept of curiosity philosophically, through questions and dialogue. What drives curiosity? Am I in control of my curiosity or rather stuck with whatever I happen to be interested in? What is curiosity like? Looking for similes, metaphors, and analogies can help us think about subjects we haven’t reflected on.
There is this interesting connection between curiosity and human life. Children exemplify it in their behavior at the preconventional stage of development, in play. Before they are indoctrinated with symbols, language, and social conventions, they move according to what appeals to them at that stage in their development. Once basic needs are met, the environment is secure and bellies are full, they sort of drift to whatever they find most interesting. The options available for interaction and play are therefore very important. This was one of Maria Montessori’s primary contributions to education: the teacher’s job (she called them “guides”) is to curate the space so that children can wander into jobs to do, tools for expression, manipulation, etc.). Curating the space is half the job!
Excluding outdoor play in nature, when at home, these options are often provided by the parents who offer some cultural product or game. But sometimes we find children slipping into the “cracks” of a given activity or game. They use the playground in ways that were not designed. They receive a great game for Christmas but end up playing with the box more. Their curiosity moves them to find these cracks, a moment-to-moment ecology of their minds (mind-bodies, more accurately) in communication with their environments. They fit the environment to the shape of their needs, sometimes better than their caregivers can. It’s a beautiful thing to witness.
For more on the subject of curiosity, you can visit my Substack. For this post, I want to get back to the mural.
Below are some of the individual student paintings embedded in the larger mural. Each picture was designed by a different student and represents that student’s answer to the mural question in pictorial form. You should be able to zoom in on them to see details better.
To encourage the attitude that the world is open to investigation and that a lifetime is not enough to achieve total, perfect understanding, each student was asked to generate a question about their answer. If we have the attitude to look, answers to questions contain yet other questions. For example, one student was curious about how in social media people represent their life, while that may not accurately reflect how things really are. They represented that with a camera which is registering part of the environment only, framing in only what the photographer wants you to see. A question that might go along with this idea might be: “How does social media affect our well being?” or, “Should we always focus on the good parts of life?”
After we finished the mural, we stepped back and lamented that people would not be able to see all the compelling questions students generated. We brainstormed how we might include them and decided on using bubbles around the painting, which were printed in a vinyl printer from the industrial arts/shop classroom. Below you can see some of their questions.
