Last spring, over 200 Chute Middle School students turned a plain brick wall into a colorful mural of two hands reaching for the sky as butterflies flutter away.
The piece is painted above a butterfly garden created by the school’s Green Steam Club, which was founded to teach students about gardening and is dedicated to retired teacher Kitty Okano, the club’s founder.
The day-to-day gardening introduces students to the climate and food production in a way they had not thought of before.
“Kids don’t realize that food just doesn’t appear at Jewel (Osco),” Individual Education Services teacher Wendy Mohrenweiser said. “The club is very simple, but it’s stuff that kids love doing.”
When the Green Steam Club planted a monarch butterfly garden in 2024, Mohrenweiser suggested creating a mural to complement the garden.
Chute media arts teacher Sherri Kushner then found Chicago-based artist Mario Mena on Instagram and asked him to be a part of the project.
“I was very excited to say yes,” said Mena, who had been looking to expand his reach outside of Chicago.
To help fund the project, the school partnered with Art Encounter, a nonprofit organization that paints murals for the city of Evanston, to win a Healing Illinois grant.
The inspiration for the project came from three key elements: butterfly migration patterns, their life cycle and connections among diverse populations, Mena said.
“The school had a very diverse demographic, so everything just tied together very well,” Mena said.
Chute’s visual arts teacher, Jamal Duncan, began the project by having his students talk about the concept of migration during class. He taught a lesson about symbolism and how the students could use it to convey complex ideas.
Evanston Township High School freshman Abigail Honore, who was in eighth grade when the mural was painted, said her class came up with the idea to paint a tree surrounded by butterflies, representing the people of Evanston coming together.
Duncan’s and Kushner’s advanced art classes worked together to come up with sketches for the mural.
“It was a great experience,” Duncan said. “To work with a lot of people and have this all come together and be successful is something the kids will be able to see for years.”
Mena’s role was to plan the art in a way that each individual section could be pieced together to form a cohesive wall without losing any of the students’ ideas in the process.
During art class on Mondays and Fridays, Mena worked with students to bring their ideas to life.
An outline of each element of the mural was printed on polytab, a polyester fabric that can be pieced together like wallpaper. After the students finished painting the polytab, Mena took the pieces back to his studio to touch up, blend together with spray paint and attach them to the wall. Developing the mural in a way that ensured the students were able to physically see their work, Mena said, was vital.
Mena said his role consisted primarily of fusing all the students’ ideas to create the final, cohesive design.
“You can look at the mural and see each student who contributed, so that was something we were especially proud of,” Kushner said.
On Sept. 9, Chute hosted a school picnic to showcase the final project. Honore, the ETHS student, attended the picnic to see the complete mural.
“To be allowed just to do things with your hand and be creative in middle school, that’s a gift to them,” Mohrenweiser said.
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
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