Mosaic Benches and Murals
To celebrate the Fine Arts Festival at Kenston Intermediate School
I worked with 4th and 5th-grade students to create permanent works of art.
We incorporated the school district’s PEAK Peaceful Environment At Kenston ethos
which consists of 12 character traits: compassion, fairness, good judgment, gratitude, hard work,
honesty, integrity, love, positive attitude, respect, responsibility, & self control.
bench #1: love, respect, responsibility
In our creative sessions, I showed the students the bold, modern artwork of Romero Britto and Peter Max. Save the Planet & Use Mass Transit by Peter Max, 1996, was the perfect inspiration for a mosaic solar system illustrating responsibility. Using a circa 200BCE wall mosaic from Herculaneum as inspiration for our sun, and quotes from Henry David Thoreau, Jackie Robinson, and Mahatma Ghandi, the kids came up with these mosaic designs.
bench #2: self control, good judgment
“The cyclone derives its power from a calm center. So does a person.” — Norman Vincent Peale. This quote, along with The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, perfectly summed up the featured character traits. One student suggested she sometimes feels like a tree bending in the wind, but standing strong. Another student added he sometimes feels like he is in a maze, and has trouble finding the right path. I suggested that Yogi Berra summed it up nicely when he said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” From these ideas, the kids created this mosaic.
bench #3: hard work, honesty, positive attitude
To introduce the themes for our bench, I played the first few minutes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the first 4 notes of which are possibly the most recognizable phrase of music ever composed. Most of the kids were familiar with the music. I also shared some photos by Dorothea Lange, and artwork by Georgia O’Keeffe. Then we had a discussion about perseverance, and working hard despite obstacles. We discussed how difficult it must be to write such timeless music. We also discussed how difficult it must have been for those 2 women to follow their creative dreams in the era in which they lived. To introduce honesty into the design, we examined Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, “The only way to have a friend, is to be one.” The kids determined that friendships are built on honesty. Our final design used O’Keeffe-inspired flowers and the opening 2 bars of the symphony.
bench #4: compassion, gratitude
The painting Dance by Henri Matisse came to mind to illustrate compassion—joyous people dancing in a circle, holding hands. The students wanted to borrow Matisse’s style, substituting endangered animals, to highlight that compassion is felt towards all creatures. We also shared what we are grateful for, and settled on gardeners and farmers, for growing our food and making the world more beautiful. We included the Chinese proverb, “When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them,” and Aesop’s proverb, “No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.”
bench #5: fairness, integrity
What better way to illustrate the concept of fairness than through games? Using the artwork style of Charley Harper, and the Italian proverb, “After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box” as inspiration, the students created a mosaic of game boards and sports equipment. To depict integrity, they created a school mascot, Integrity Man. Using game pieces, we spelled out the W. Clement Stone phrase, “Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.” We even incorporated some vintage brass keys in the mosaic.