Having seen other decorations around the school, studio art teacher Amy Cruz brainstormed with special education teacher Kate McGranaghan to find a way to brighten their shared hallway. Cruz eventually decided to collaborate with her senior studio art classes to create an interactive art piece that both classes, studio art and special education, could participate in.
“I was like, ‘How about this year we get some art students to do outline drawings?’ Then we would provide art materials to everybody who has classrooms back there, and whenever the mood strikes or people need a brain break, they can just add color,” Cruz said. “The idea came about because the hallway was boring and sad, and then people started to add stuff to it, and it got better. I thought, ‘Let’s keep doing stuff about it.’”
Students from the special education classes will color in the drawings once they are hung in the hallway, using materials such as crayons and markers provided by the art department. The activity is designed to be flexible and self-paced, allowing students to participate during downtime or as part of their daily classroom routines.
When studio art students arrived in class on Aug. 28, they saw a long sheet of blank white paper covering every table. Handing out black markers, Cruz told the students that they would be decorating the paper to hang in the hallway.
“I explained what was going to happen to (the paper), so they knew it was going to be displayed and hung and people were going to color it in. I just directed and told them to draw the most cheerful, happy, positive things,” Cruz said. “A lot of art students have a thing that they draw, whether it’s Batman or strawberries or just a thing that they like to draw. I told them to just draw a bunch of things — draw rainbows, unicorns, puppies, kittens and whatever else you want.”
Senior and Advanced Placement Studio Art student Kate Khugaeva was present during class when Cruz initially proposed the idea to them. She recalls how this activity was a nice break from their usual work.
“I was really excited to see what we were doing. I first walked into the room and I just saw the white paper on the desk and I was really excited because it looked like a fun break from the course introduction,” Khugaeva said. “I thought that it was such a cool and nice thing to do. I was really excited to see how people would color in what I had drawn.”
Cruz hopes that by providing this art, students will be able to relax from a stressful day and form positive memories. In the future, she plans to lead more collaborative art projects between the studio art and special education classes.
“I always have the goal of making the world better with art, which sounds cliché and cheesy, but I think sometimes clichés exist because they are true. This was just a little tiny speck of a moment that I thought we could make (something) into something better, like a boring hallway,” Cruz said. “When students see something they did displayed, it gives them a good feeling, which I love to see.”
Abby Chong can be reached at [email protected].
