The Delaware Art Museum unveiled a mural celebrating Black History Month Thursday night, but it didn’t come from a professional artist.
Eight students from Dickinson and William Penn High Schools created the piece as part of the museum’s recently launched Mural Arts Interpretation Project.
The initiative brings together students with limited exposure to arts education to work on a project. In this case, they spent 10 weeks working on three-panel mural inspired by the piece Study for a Mural by African American illustrator and muralist Aaron Douglas, known for his place in the Harlem Renaissance.
Arts educator and artist Chad Cortez Everett led the project. He says it was truly a collaborative effort.
"Each student made their own contribution to the mural and that's what I liked about it," said Everett. "Each student may not have had an art background, but they brought energy to the table that gave us something to feed off of. They were willing to work with each other."
And students involved say they gained from the experience.
“I really wasn’t expecting anything like this," said Denise Ruiz, a senior at William Penn. "When they said we are modernizing somebody else’s painting, I still didn’t know what to expect. And then when we all started I said 'This is pretty exciting' because I like to paint myself at home and I want to be a fashion designer so it kind of tie into what I want to do”
“[Before this] I usually wasn’t into art. However, I did learn from this. It gave me patience. It kept me calm. And it let my mind flow in so many different ways,” said Kim Martinez, another William Penn senior.
Everett says the students also produced a piece that reflects their views and experience.
"It's more than I expected," said Everett. "The Aaron Douglass painting is very monochromatic, and at first we were going to take that approach. Then, we spoke with the young artists and they said 'No, we don't want to do that. We want vibrant, bright colors in the piece.' And at first, we were a little stand-offish about that, but then we said 'take the leash off' and let them do what they want to do with the piece and take it the the level they want to."
You can see the student mural - entitled Into the Future - at the Delaware Art Museum through the end of the month.
This piece is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
