ArtsBuild Community Mural at Borders Books & Music, 4235 N.
Oracle Rd, Tucson AZ.
The mural section shown is 6 feet high by 48 feet long. It was painted by third, fourth and fifth grade students at Richey Elementary School. The entire mural is 88 feet long, created on masonite panels by more than 200 grade 3-5 children from Richey and Pueblo Gardens Elementary Schools as part of the ArtsBuild Community Mural Project.
Over 12 weeks, under the direction of Arts Genesis Artist/Educator Michael B. Schwartz, M.F.A., the children decided for themselves how to express their vision of community. They conceived, sketched, and painted every panel in the mural, all without a single adult brushstroke. In each of the eight classrooms involved, the student-artists discussed their ideas about community, drafted and redrafted their class design in order to integrated everyone’s ideas, then figured out how to blend their panels with those of the other classes.
The result is more than pictures of the children’s neighborhoods and schools. Here you see humans and aliens helping each other, sports, buildings, lots of mountains, water, fantastic animals and low-riders. The mural represents these youths' highest hopes and wildest dreams for their communities. It is a complex, large-scale artwork, a work of significance to the participating young artists and their neighborhoods.
Arts Genesis, Inc. developed the ArtsBuild community Mural Project to allow these children to enhance their sense of community and to make their own statement about their world. With its permanent installation at Border’s Books and Music, the mural becomes part of the Tucson community and its citywide tradition of mural making. Parents, teachers, and friends may come here to appreciate and learn from the mural. Children visiting Border’s will see validation for their way for seeing, drawing, painting, and envisioning their own communities.
Classroom teachers and Arts Genesis Artist/ Educators worked together for five months to make community a unifying theme of study across the curriculum. Pueblo Gardens and Old Pascua are among Tucson’s oldest historic neighborhoods. Each has strong cultural roots and family traditions that influenced the mural’s content and design. In addition to drawing and painting, the project involved classes in dance taught by Mary Ann Brehm, Ph.D.; music taught by Bruce Phillips; and creative writing taught by Jacqueline Raphael, M.F.A. It was directed by AGI Founding Director Carol S. Kestler, assisted by Apprentice Artist/Educator Josh Lange.