High School students create mural
posted October 29, 2007

Mural painting is public art. It is born in and of public space, and there it stays, engaging passersby and making its statement to the general public, to the man on the street.

Or, to the student in the hallway in the case of Red Cloud High School's incipient mural, which will be painted on a white stretch of wall opposite the art room. According to art teacher Leah Peterson, the painting—the first of its kind in the high school—will attempt to embody the diverse elements that together constitute Red Cloud student identity, "encompassing culture while representing the school in a positive way...mixing older traditions with newer traditions."

The sketch for the painting bears out Peterson's words. Red Cloud sports players at play tumble across prairie hills. Above them, clouds billow and swirl into Chief Red Cloud’s visage and an imaginative portrait of Crazy Horse, who throughout his life refused to let photographers take his picture. In the foreground, a female fancy shawl dancer dances beside a grass dancer who in turn dances beside a break dancer; sitting on a wall bearing a "Crusaders" tag, a boy idly strums his guitar.

Students from Peterson's Art II and Introduction to Painting classes collaborated on the project's planning and will collaborate on the painting itself when it begins, on Monday, October 29. The four students in Art II—senior Ida Clark, Ryan Sherman, and Lisa Bear Robe, and junior Melissa Shoulders—will each be responsible for one of the four figures in the foreground. Peterson told me she hopes the process will take "less than a month," though she conceded that the real goal was to have the mural done by Christmas.

The project finds its origins in Peterson's hiring as the art teacher, earlier this year. While interviewing Peterson for the job, principal Nick Dressel asked whether she would be interested in overseeing the painting of a school mural. Peterson thought it sounded like a great idea for a class project and took over from there.

Peterson hopes similar public art projects will emerge in the future. She has, for example, lobbied the administration for a designated student graffiti wall, to serve as a collective creative outlet for Red Cloud’s student body. (Graffiti walls of this sort are commonplace in many schools and smaller towns.) But, she noted, no such projects are currently in the works.

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