Advocacy: Woven Together

like to begin the school year with a collaborative project that involves the entire school—usually a temporary installation that goes up on a wall in one of the school’s hallways. I work in Michigan’s second largest public school district, and I teach art to grades K–6. Our school is a Title 1 school and houses a POHI (Physically or Otherwise Health Impaired) program.

I usually ask students to create a personal piece of art that will be taped or glued to a mural. One year, they colored concentric circles and attached them to a large paper tree I put on the wall. The colorful circles represented stylized leaves. Last year, since we were finally back to in-person learning, students added their favorite flowers to a garden mural to represent that we were growing and learning together again.

A Permanent Mural
During summer vacation six years ago, I watched a video by an artist documenting his painting process. He would cover his canvas with horizontal rows of masking tape and paint large abstract designs and swaths of paint across the top of the tape. He then removed the tape and added another layer of tape in a vertical direction. He repeated this process many times.

I tried this technique with students when we started school in the fall to much success, and when I recently moved to a new school, I wanted to try it again. This time, I decided that we would paint on a large canvas and create a permanent addition to our school walls. I purchased a 30 x 48" (76 x 122 cm) canvas and painted the entire canvas black. After the paint dried, I marked the sides at every inch around the canvas to ensure that when I added lines of masking tape, they would be as straight as possible across the painting.

Collaborative Painting
I typically teach six classes a day. The first three classes painted whatever designs and messages they wanted on the canvas. I assigned one color to each class so when the painting was complete, they could search for the color they used. I explained that this would be a collaborative painting from every student in the school. I told them that each class was using a different color, and that each layer would have unique patterns and designs that represented them. We used tempera paint because I didn’t want to use acrylic paint with younger students.

At lunchtime, I would remove the tape, and the painting would be dry enough to add a new layer of tape in the opposite direction. If the morning groups worked on a horizontal plane, the afternoon groups worked on a vertical plane. I spaced the rows of tape when I added them, leaving a half-inch gap between each row. I also used different thicknesses of tape to create variation in the linear design and changed the width of space between those rows.

Each time I removed the tape, our painting looked more like a rich tapestry woven with many different colored fibers. And then it hit me: This is a perfect representation of the many cultures and languages that are spoken in our school community. The title Woven Together was a natural fit.

Completion
Once the painting was complete, I painted the edges black to give it a finished look. Then I used pourable resin to seal the paint and give the piece a high-gloss finish. (I used a heat gun to get the bubbles out of the resin before it dried.) I love how the resin makes the colors stand out even more, but when students saw the finished product on display, their reactions ranged from amazement to pride. It was the topic of discussion for weeks!