Students get creative with mosaic mural

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This article was published 19/09/2014 (4248 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This week, Winnipeg School Division (WSD) students collaborated on a human rights-themed art project to coincide with the opening of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The Everybody Has the Right mosaic mural features 168 eight-by-10-inch canvas tiles created by 168 students from 77 schools in the division, with each tile representing its artist’s individual interpretation of human rights.

The tiles, created at Luxton School from Sept. 15 to 19, are numbered, with each one containing a few pencil lines that, when assembled, will create an image of hands reaching up into space. What the student decided to paint around those lines was entirely up to them.

“They’re choosing colours that are meaningful to them,” said Joe Halas, WSD art education consultant. “They’re choosing imagery, sometimes words, and they’re expressing their ideas of what’s important to them about human rights. What we’ll have in the end is 168 completely original and unique pieces of art by each child, but there will be a group expression because of the way everyone has agreed to work the hand image into the overall design.”

Halas said the finished mural will be displayed in three different ways. First, the assembled mural and the individual tiles will be photographed and made available digitally, with an enlarged view option for each tile, as well as a recorded statement from each artist.

Second, the assembled mural, which Halas said will be eight-by-12-feet in size, will be on public display at a yet-to-be-announced venue.

Finally, posters will be made of the mural and the piece will be disassembled, with each school getting a poster and their individual tiles for public display.

For her contribution to the mural, Vera Kluckmann, a Grade 6 student at Riverview School, painted a large foot and small foot, with a continent in the background.

“I’m trying to represent that human rights counts for everyone, old and young and everywhere, even though that doesn’t happen sometimes,” Kluckmann said.

On her tile, Natalia Morcilla, a Grade 6 student at Robert H. Smith School, painted checkered squares, each a different colour.  

“They’re representing that you have the right to be different,” Morcilla said of the squares. “Each square is a different colour and you have the right to be yourself and you don’t have to listen to what others think of you, just be yourself,”  

In addition to the mosaic mural, WSD held human rights-themed assemblies and activities at its individual schools during the week of Sept. 15 to 19.

Halas said the mural project is special because of the diversity of the student’s representations of human rights.

“Some kids do a very abstract painting and the nice thing is when they talk about it, they just say they chose to represent freedom,” Halas said. “In other cases they’re quite literal. Some kids will integrate words and some were just drawing food, like ‘kids have the right to eat.’ It’s whatever they want to do.”