Yonder in the Schools

Some of the work we’re proudest of never started as a commission — it started in a classroom. Over the years we’ve partnered with schools across the region — from grade-school classrooms to high-school art rooms to the college studio — to bring students through the full arc of a public artwork: brainstorming a concept, sketching and refining a design, scaling it to a wall, and standing back together when it’s finished. The students don’t just watch us paint. They make the art happen.

If you teach — and you’ve ever looked at a blank wall in your school and imagined what your students could do with it — this is what that partnership looks like.

From a classroom to a public wall

Our signature student project began with eight teenagers from Algoma Venture Academy, who approached us over the winter wanting to learn how a mural really gets made. We taught the class — color theory, composition, the logic of public art — and together they designed a wall for the alley behind our studio. In late spring we opened it up as a community paint-by-number, and around 150 neighbors turned out to fill it in. The result is This Is Us, still one of the warmest things in our city. That project is the template for everything below: students lead the design, the community helps finish it, and the wall belongs to everyone after.

Murals, designed by students

The model travels. In Kewaunee, the KHS Advanced Art students worked with us to design a retro downtown scene — a sunset over the bay, a vintage car, a fisherman in the reeds — and then came out and painted it themselves. Down the road, that same energy produced the school’s bold “Storm” mural, a mascot piece bursting with the things their classmates love, which earned a nice write-up in the Kewaunee County Star-News for the legacy those students left behind.

Back in Algoma, students at Algoma Venture Academy painted a new mural right inside their own school — a rainbow of bilingual affirmations rising over painted waves: Whatever you are, be a good one. Florece donde estás plantado. The sky is the limit. Kindness matters. Special kudos to Jasmine, who led that one.

In the college studio, too

This work goes back further than the grade schools — all the way to the college studio. For years we led painting and design classes at Silver Lake College in Manitowoc, walking students through the same arc we use today: concept, design, scale, wall.

One of the most striking was the Diversity Project (2016), where an entire freshman class each painted a large black-and-white self-portrait. Installed together along a long concrete wall, the individual faces became something bigger — a gallery of everyone who made up that class, no two alike.

Other classes took on sweeping wall-length chalk murals: a St. Francis piece by the Freshman Class of 2019, its branches, birds, and leaves spreading the whole length of the wall —

— and a Matisse-inspired mural by the Class of 2020, blue panels alive with white cut-out dancers and yellow bursts straight out of Jazz.

Different campus, same conviction: hand a student real tools and real scale, and they’ll make something the whole community stops to look at.

Workshops, not just walls

Not every collaboration ends in a mural. We’ve hosted young artists in the studio for hands-on workshops too — our block-printing class for ArtBeet Kewaunee’s Youth Art Month, where students cut and pulled their own linocut prints, and a collage workshop with Kewaunee County 4-H. We’ve also hosted the county’s Youth Art Month exhibition in our gallery, putting student work on the walls for the whole town to see. Different mediums, same idea: put real tools in young hands and let them make something they’re proud to hold up.

Let’s make one together

If you’re a teacher, art instructor, or principal thinking about a mural or a workshop for your students, we’d love to talk. These projects are some of the most rewarding work we do, and every school is different — we’ll build the project around your students, your wall, and your timeline. Get in touch and let’s see what your kids can make.