Creating a Community

FAIR School in Crystal, Minnesota is housed in a beautiful new building and needed art on the walls to make the inside as creative as the outside. After all, this grade 4-8 school is an arts-focused school – and the outside is shaped like a dragon.

Instead of hiring an artist to work in isolation and paint a mural in the entryway, FAIR School wanted to use adorning their entryway as an opportunity to create community.

The principal of FAIR School Crystal hopes a new mural at the school's entrance will stop passersby in their tracks. A grant commissioned a COMPAS artist to work with students, staff and community members on the new mural. Parents got to paint on the mural during parent-teacher conferences and Crystal Police stopped by to paint a little bit too.

So they called COMPAS.

COMPAS Arts Program Director, Julie Strand, helped them activate their hopes and dreams with a work plan and the selection of COMPAS muralist, Victor Yepez, to lead the project.

This fall Victor is facilitating the design and completion of the mural. To understand students’ vision for the mural he shared examples of other murals and then had students draw or write out their ideas. Using their input he created a design for the school that incorporates the community’s vision and then translated the design onto the large wall surface.

“When I look at this mural, it says community to me. It says family,” said Zoraba Ross, Principal at FAIR School, Crystal. “We have our students, we have our teachers and we have our parents. Then we have the community coming together to put this mural together with Victor.”

As students work on the mural they are learning brush techniques, color theory, design, scale, and teamwork. This has truly been a community-building event. In addition to students and parents, other community members have been invited to pick up a brush. Even Crystal police officers are spending time with students.

Creative experiences have the capacity to ignite our imaginations and strengthen our connections. As FAIR School student Lanayja Heinks-Fluker says, creating the mural together shows, “this is a school that cares about the kids.”

Connect with Julie to talk about how creative experiences can build community at your site!