As of this past week, the Art Honors Society has put the finishing touches on their semester-long project set to beautify the new art building on campus. The project ended with a tiled and hand-painted mural replica of Lichtenstein’s “I Can See the Whole Room…and There’s Nobody in It” located on the empty wall of the building’s boys’ restroom.
According to co-president of the Art Honors Society senior Al-e McWhorter, the project was initially meant to take a couple months at most, but as it unfolded, it ended up taking much longer than anticipated.
“We actually decided on two projects to do this year,” McWhorter said. “Both were murals located in the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms.”
However, due to the lack of time, they plan on passing the second mural, on as a responsibility for next year’s presidents of Art Honors Society. It will be located by the girls’ bathroom.
“There are obviously more than a few restrooms on campus,” McWhorter said. “But the ones in the art buildings are newly built and had these completely empty cement walls in them. We wanted to spice them up and get the new building a little more attention.”
“There are so many ideas we had, but this just ended up where we decided on starting,” McWhorter said.
The selection process for exactly what pieces of art were selected, consisted of what McWhorter called a “democracy vote” and eventually, the group settled on Lichtenstein and Monet.
“The original intent was to get local artists incorporated into our projects to decorate the building,” McWhorter said.
After selection, artists spanned out the work, transferred the image onto a series of tiles and set them to numbers to maintain order. According to McWhorter is was really a matter of getting it onto the wall afterwards.
“The actual process is really complicated,” McWhorter said, explaining the process of transferring and graphics the replica of the artwork onto the tiles. “The boys bathroom was our trial run with Lichtenstein but next year’s girls bathroom mural will be a much more well-known work of art—it’ll be Claude Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’.”
“It was really fun, I worked on it a lot with other seniors,” said senior club member Kayla Farrell-Martin. “It was a big puzzle…but a little weird having to work in the boys bathroom.”
As for the legacy of Art Honors Society, you can find their work in every nook and cranny of the school nondiscriminatory of the library chairs and walls, CEA mural, and artwork along the ceilings of the history hallways.
Moreover, Peters says she hopes next year’s presidents carry out tradition beyond finishing the bathroom murals.
