I love collaborating with teachers and administrators in school settings, and it’s an honor to be able to build partnerships that last for multiple years. In the 2022-2023 school year, Woolslair art teacher Dino DeIuliis contacted me through Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media about creating a mural to boost school spirit and community, especially after students were readjusting to in-person school after the height of the pandemic. STEAM teacher Heather Laurent joined us a collaborator as STEAM classes would be exploring the theme of recycling that winter/spring, and scheduling with the two fifth grade classes during both art and STEAM periods allowed us me to meet with the students more often than their usual six-day rotation for specials typically allowed. The design featured a wolf (the mascot of Woolslair) howling at the moon while overlooking the Pittsburgh skyline while abstracted fireworks and stars shimmered in the night sky.

I love to start a mural project with a small personal project so that students can build skills and confidence, gain familiarity with the tools and materials, and have something to take home as a memento for the project after they graduate from the school. After a few intro sessions, we were off to the races, filling in city buildings and the green hilltop with rounded can pieces. I opted to paint the purple background at home so that we could use our class time focusing on the more interesting details. The students also worked in small rotating groups to help create the details on the wolf’s body with a metalsmithing process called chasing.

Our final project details included adding colorful recycled fireworks made from CDs and painted blind slats in the sky, and adding small windows in the Pittsburgh city skyline. We took photographs of each student which were printed and placed into a piece of recycled 35mm slide organizer plastic. In addition to being an amazing art teacher, Dino is an excellent art installer, and we were thrilled at how quickly the piece was on display for everyone to enjoy. The students later commented that they felt proud to have made something from trash that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill!

In the 2023-2024 school year, I was invited back by Dino DeIuliis and Principal Kimberly Safran so as to create a new mural celebrating EQUITY with the year’s graduating fifth graders. Equity is such an important concept but also a tough one to illustrate, especially for an elementary audience. We opted for a design that was bright and colorful and that would promote equity by allowing for opportunities for each student to participate to their interest and ability, striving for open-ended projects that allowed for multiple intelligences and forms of creativity to shine. We chose hand silhouettes around the mural border to emphasize individuality and some of the imagery, though subtle, also is meant to be evocative of common equity metaphors. For example, the arched ladders in the bottom half of the mural evoke the different-sized step ladders in a common apple picking metaphor to illustrate equity by artist Tony Ruth. The steps along the top edge of the mural also evoke another common metaphor viewable in the above link, this one of people trying to watch a baseball game with different sized step stools.

This 2023-2024 project started with individual can collages that incorporated a layer of watercolor stain, then shifted focus to drawn and collaged elements exploring elements of design like pattern and repetition. Students painted on a large scale to fill in background colors, then helped to glue down all the paper/cardstock elements as well. We created an embossed foil square (along the top edge) and on the last day, students added hammered can piece embellishments. Heather Laurent was on maternity leave during the spring, so big thanks to longterm sub Ashley McMahon, and amazing fifth grade teachers Jaiquette Dennison and Kyra Schurko. And special thanks, as always to the incredible students during both school years who were so dedicated and motivated!