By Ed Finkel, LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program
The West Haven “Phoenix Rising” mural on the back wall of Victor Herbert Elementary School facing Touhy Herbert Park looked faded, chipped, warped and slumped over earlier this summer, but soon it will rise again and look just like new.
That’s because it is new – the mural was repainted on cloth earlier this summer by 15 West Haven high school students, and that cloth will be glued onto the wall in place of the old wooden panels this month. Muralist Damon Lamar Reed, who led the summer project, says this process will be much more durable for the outdoors.
“After it’s done, it actually looks like it’s part of the wall,” said Reed, speaking during the six-week program he ran in a classroom at Crane High School, with funding from LISC/Chicago and After School Matters, and assistance from NCP lead agency Near West Side Community Development Corp. in recruiting the student-artists.
NCP director Paulette Boyd contacted Reed through the Chicago Public Art Group. “They were questioning, ‘What’s the best way to go about redoing it?’ ” Reed recalled. Students applied online, where they filled out a questionnaire about their experience and interests; they received a stipend for the summer.
Three or four students at a time, assigned different sections of the mural based on their artistic strengths, sprawled on the floor of the classroom amidst their paint palettes while others worked on side projects that Reed assigned. A visitor to the classroom needed to tread carefully to avoid ending up splashed with colors.
Reed interrupted answering questions to direct students at various points: “If you’re not working on the mural, you should be working on your own projects,” he said at one point. Sometimes, his directions were more technical: “Your lights are too light,” or, “Try and make your colors blend together.”
Who Am I?
But Reed said he recognizes that most of the students probably will not grow up to become professional artists, and he wanted to offer a broader value-added for them than just technical art tips.
In addition to the class project to repaint the mural, students took on a half-dozen individual projects, ranging from self-portraits, to cityscapes, to their own money.
“Even though it’s an art class, a lot of times most of them realistically are not giong to be artists, or trying to be artists,” Reed said. “At the beginning, we worked on different projects to get them warmed up. I try to focus the projects on trying to understand something about themselves, to discover something. For each of the projects, there was a question they had to answer.”
In addition to visually portraying that answer and learning painting techniques, students wrote a paragraph to accompany their artwork. For the self-portrait, for example, that written piece covered “how you see yourself, and what makes you you,” he said. The money design came with a written answer to the question, “What makes you valuable?”
Reed said he’s been undertaking similar projects through the Public Art Group for several years and has worked with NCP lead agency Lawndale Christian Development Corp. in the past. “It’s always about more than just teaching art skills,” he said. “Usually four or five are really interested in art. The rest, it’s to build self-confidence and understand their purpose in life. It’s about, what can they take with them after the program?”
‘New Experience’
Participants said they had taken plenty. “I never painted a mural, and I always wanted to,” said Andrew Singleton, who’s entering his freshman year at the rebuilt Westinghouse High School. “The part I liked most was learning how to draw, and making sure to be neat with it and get the details right.”
Jessica Hill, entering her freshman year at Crane, said she’s done plenty of artwork over the years but never anything like the mural. “It was very creative,” she said. “I liked the [other projects]. I like to cooperate together and work as a team.”
Cortez Sanders, a sophomore at Chicago Hope Academy, said he’s been painting since fifth grade and helped with a mural on a wall of Circle Rock Prep School in Chicago. “It’s hard,” he said. “I like learning how to paint on different materials.”
Holy Trinity senior Brooke Dunlap said she liked projects like the self-portrait. “I wouldn’t have been able to do that” before the class, she said. “I liked learning how to mix colors. It’s been a new experience.”
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