Where Amazing Happens (Hyde Park - Chicago)

The name of this course is "If These Walls Could Talk," and surrounds its curriculum around historic artistic views and defining "mural." For the first Action Project of my Humanities course this Elective Term, we had to create a drawn piece of art work that signifies what our chosen neighborhood needs. For example: if someone's chosen neighborhood has a violence problem, maybe they can draw a no shooting picture. We also have to tie this back in to what we have been learning by utilizing historic styles of art. We have to also utilize our mind and think of symbolic ways to get our point across, which is my favorite part of the project. I chose to pick the Hyde Park neighborhood because I currently live there and it's one of my favorite places to be. Researching the neighborhood was pretty easy because it's widely known as a pretty important place in Chicago. This made my project flow pretty smoothly because I could easily research what I had to.

DR. "Where Amazing Happens," Nov 30, 2015

DNR
11/2015
Where Amazing Happens
Pencil on paper 11” x 14”

In my art piece, you can clearly see the the statement in the middle of the drawing. It says "Where Amazing Happens," and if you look closely you can see "Hyde Park" faded in the background. The intended message that I hope to get across is that greatness has came out of the Hyde Park neighborhood, so this is inspiration for people my age and younger to be something great, no matter what neighborhood you're from. From my research, I realized a lack of education in Hyde Park, as the main school there, Kenwood Academy High School, has a 50% reading proficiency rate and 40% mathematics proficiency rate. These are fairly average numbers for a CPS High School, but I believe my neighborhood can do better! This serves a problem to me, because the worse this situation gets, the more kids on the streets, which means more killings and all types of other bad stuff. 

If you look closely, you can see my horizon line, drawn through the middle of the drawing, this is where the eyes of my viewer are first drawn to. There are also buildings throughout the drawing with a long path that has a vanishing point. I tried to create this art as a tribute to Hyde Park and simply, all the greatness that comes out of my neighorhood, with shoutouts to Mary Lincoln, Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, Erne Duncan, and Vic Mensa. These are all people that are and have done great things. 

I colored my drawing accordingly to the color of each symbol. So, the Save Money symbol is red, so I colored it red, and Ali's gloves were usually red or gold, so I colored them red as well. 

Going Places, Seeing Faces

For the third unit of my Art History Elective, "If These Walls Could Talk," we worked in teams and come up with a mural to put in our new school building. Yes, they are allowing us to make full murals on the walls of the space in our new school building! There's a lot of responsibility and very high expectations, which ultimately makes this project even harder to pull through. I loved the original and creative ideas my group and I came up with. There was a lot of confusion and a bit of arguing, but we pulled through. I'm so glad we were granted the opportunity to help spice up the new school. I hope you enjoy our creativity, we made this for you as well!

Imagine an assortment of different faces staring at you from one collaged face, all on one wall. Also imagine that those faces are pasted on top of very beautiful stenciled flowers. Well, that is our mural. The media used to carry out our project was mostly spraypaint or block-printing ink. The first step in our long process was to go along the stairs that we were assigned, and just clean the walls. This took a bit longer than anticipated, but it was fun, as was the rest of the project, which I will explain more thoroughly. While the wall dried, my peers and I started the taping process. The taping process consists of using tape to cover up certain parts of the wall that you don’t want to get paint on, and it took a very long time to cover all 5 walls. Luckily though, after the taping process, painting wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Painting took 2 or 3 days tops. We chose a light, kind of silver color and it looks very nice in my opinion. After painting, we started with our block printing and spray painting. We used a white ink for block printing the flowers onto the West and East walls. We used black, red, and white spray paint for our stenciled flowers. We decided to create flowers to represent the beauty & growth of our school! We created the flowers by carving material to slap on the surface with paint on the slapped-on side. The other method we used for the creation of the flowers was stenciling, which consisted of tracing and cutting out the flowers shapes and spray painting it on the wall. The good vibes coming from a bigger and better environment was enough to give us the idea of a positive and serene background like a flower. After the beauty comes the uniqueness of the piece. My group and I decided to create collages of people from our school. Each of the collages are unique in their own way, as each collage is made by a different person. The collages were wheatpasted over the flowers on the wall. Wheatpaste is a kind of adhesive mixture of flour and water that allows things to be hung or pasted up on a surface.

The roles in our group were quite simple. There was a Documentarian who took pictures and videos of us while we worked through the project. There was a mule who went back and forth to make sure we had the needed materials to complete our project. There’s the Director of Operations and Artistic Director who worked hand-in-hand together to make sure the project is working smoothly and looks good. My favorite role was Director of Operations because I was the man making sure everyone was on task. I really didn’t like Documentarian because it took away from the experience. I didn’t enjoy filming people doing the job that I helped put together. I wanted be in the field! Even though the outcome was quite nice and I loved how it came out, I would have loved more access to higher places on the walls and more time to make the mural the BEST it can be.

I had an amazing group of people working with me on this project and the overall experience was really cool and life-changing to even get a chance to have such a big impact on the GCE Community. I would like to also thank my school for the chance, and I hope they love the effort we put forth as much as we do.