Allan Appel photo
Artist Adae with Common Ground student Leon Armstrong.
Kids with hands upraised half way between shouting hallelujah and playing volleyball with an immense sun. A green plant as imposing as Jack’s beanstalk growing out of the palm of one girl’s outstretched hand while goats, cats and two hens, notably a Buff Orpington and a Polish chicken, dash happily underfoot.
Those joyous images are at the heart of “Class of 2025,” a lush and engaging mural executed by long-time New Haven muralist Kwadwo Adae and the entire sophomore class (thus the title) at Common Ground High School.
Tuesday morning Adae and several of his collaborating tenth-grade artists were on hand for an impromptu but festive ceremony to unveil the mural, the very first on an interior wall of the ecology-focused charter high school at 358 Springside Ave. They were also there to reflect on the process as well as the product of six weeks of collaboration.
“It was like being the conductor of a visual orchestra,” Adae, explained, “and the students were players.”
And yet both were also composers of the composition.
With funding received both from the Barr Foundation and a pandemic-relief American Rescue Plan Act/Connecticut state grant to create interdisciplinary, beyond-the-classroom curricula that enhance health and wellbeing at the school, Adae was engaged and came up to Common Ground High School, Urban Farm, and Education Center just after the spring break.
He listened to all 50 kids, reported Common Ground Director of Engagement Joel Tolman, and listened very well, taking copious notes (“We want goats! We want trees, West Rock, diversity!”) on the range of imagery that would reflect the kids’ lives in general and at Common Ground in particular.
That included not only animals, trees, plants, and farming, but also Hello Kitty and Star Wars imagery and lots of other references this reporter knows not of.
Adae took home his notes and began to think about elements and a design.
“To be a student here, you have to want to be connected to nature. So there’s tree planting, she’s literally growing a plant from her hand,” he said of one of the central images that eventually emerged.
The task was to find images that reflect, through the kids’ eyes, “the magic of the place.”
And here’s how the sun came about to play such a prominent part in the composition: “I looked at my notes and I noticed so much was involved with the sun.” He got to thinking about the sun and agriculture, he said, and realized without the sun there’s nothing.
Art teacher Nicole Mackin, Adae, and student artists.
Adae returned with an initial sketch, reported art teacher Nicole Mackin, and all 50 of the kids had their chance for feedback.
“Some wanted more goats,” she recalled. More chickens – hens – were also added. And Adae and one tenth grader, Jonathan Hayek, had a back-and-forth about lettering. Hayek particularly liked to do lettering. So he ended up placing “CGHS” on the fluttering flap of the pants of one of the figures.
As part of that discussion, Adae said the number he had originally placed in the sketch on the jersey of the basketball-playing figure to the left was also changed to “25.”
The reason: Because the mural belongs to the sophomore class, the class of 2025, he said. “So one day they can come back, ten years from now maybe,” added Tolman, and remember their contribution.
Hello Kitty remains on the mural, as do many other references important in the lives of the kids, in the clothing of the figures. Still Adae, who is experienced in doing murals with students and in school settings, takes each element seriously and he even researched the Hello Kitty logo.
“She stands for love, acceptance, friends,” he said, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.
Nothing indeed.
After Adae sketched in the figures on the wall, students over the course of the following week, were given tubes of acrylic paint and brushes, and divided up the work so that all could participate.
The hall is narrow, and faces a wall of dull grey lockers, which it now enlivens. The corridor also is tucked between a nurse’s office at one end and on the other a passageway to other buildings on the campus.
Yet there were no accidents as passers-by encouraged the artists and they and Adae just inhaled deeply, he reported, to make a few inches more of room for kids, rushing by to class, to pass safely.
In parts the production was not unlike a Renaissance workshop where artists with specific skills — clouds, drapery, architectural elements, for example – are assigned those to execute by the master artist.
James Stanley near the section he painted.
When sophomore James Stanley, for example, came by and said he had some skill at painting appendages, especially feet and toes, Adae took note. Soon enough the young man was painting in the feet of one figure and the large coming-at-you hand out of which the plant is ascending skyward in the center of the composition.
Adae, whose many in and out of school projects include, most recently, an LGBT heroes-focused mural at the Elm City Montessori School, said, “As a public artist, your work has to reflect the surroundings where you are.”
As this reporter was leaving, James Stanley took me aside and proudly reported, “I painted the toes.”