Guadalupe kids to create, with computers, wall-sized mural for display throughout town
Project uses art, history and computers
On a recent summer day In a computer lab in Guadalupe, Calif., 11 kids from McKenzie Junior High School take turns snapping portraits of each other using a digital camera. When they're done, the teacher, artist Osiris Castañeda, shows them how to download the photographs to the computer, open them up in a software program, and print them out. The kids then take paint and paintbrushes, and under Castañeda's direction begin to hand-paint the pictures. Later, as a final step, they take a pen, and, with a little encouragement, write something about themselves on their portraits.
This summerlong class, which meets twice a week, is not a traditional school offering. It will require students to learn about their family history and culture and acquire skills in Photoshop, art and writing. The aim is to enable the kids to create digital collages about how they see Guadalupe. The collages will be pieced together into a wall-sized mural for display in the town.
The project is part of Guadalupe Speaks, one of nine Communities Speak projects the Council is supporting under its California Stories initiative. The mural project is also sponsored by the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission in association with the Guadalupe Educational Technology Association, which is providing the space.
Castañeda sees the class as an opportunity for the kids to learn about their heritage through art-making and to talk about social issues in the community. It also gives them a chance to pick up skills in Photoshop while learning about the mural creation process. Just knowing Photoshop, Castañeda says, will be useful to them in high school and college and could influence them to think of graphic design or the arts as a future career.
Castañeda is patterning the class after the collective mural-making process used by artist Judy Baca, who created the "Great Wall of Los Angeles," a half-mile-long mural depicting California's ethnic history. Baca has involved thousands of people in the creation of murals, including first-graders and juvenile offenders.
In addition to exposing kids to digital photography, Castañeda has brought in books about famous muralists -- Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros and JosÎ Clemente Orosco. The class looks at the murals and talks about them together. Then Castañeda shows them how to find some of the same images on the Internet and later how to combine the digital mural with the photo of themselves taken earlier.
Similar to the process with the portraits, the kids print out the mural -- now integrated with their photographs -- and hand-paint the image. "It's preparing them for the kind of work they'll be doing when they start bringing in their own photographs and creating the mural," Castañeda says.
Castañeda's inspiration for his work with kids derives from his own experience. "I grew up in Virginia and Tennessee, and I was sometimes afraid of appearing too Latino and being overheard speaking Spanish," he says. "As I got older, I began to explore my own heritage and its contributions to society. And I also started finding out about revolutionary movements for poor people. And I realized how important it was to combat poverty and ignorance and at the same time find pride in your heritage. And that is what I think this project can give to these kids.
I tell the kids that I want to help them learn about their own history and culture, so that they can embrace it and know who they are. I think that once they have that, they can accomplish anything."
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The mural will be displayed at McKenzie Junior High School and at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts and Education Center later this year. For information about the project, contact Osiris Castañeda at 805/965-2623 or osirisbox@cox.net