By Emma Shuford ’22 News Reporter
If you happened to find yourself walking to class by the quad at Mercersburg Academy on October 24, you likely came across seniors gathered around tall panels of wood in small groups, covered completely in paint from head to toe, some standing on ladders to reach the tops of their creations. With the hot sun beating down on them, those seniors were plunging into one of the most epic battles the campus has witnessed this year.
On that sunny day, these seniors embarked on a Springboard field trip day, a day that allowed students to dedicate class time to their respective capstone projects. In the Commarts Springboard, led by art teacher Kristen Pixler, seniors engaged in Mercersburg’s first ever Mural Battle, a competition between Commarts students, which culminated in the awarding of first, second and third place accolades. Pixler was inspired to create the contest after a trip to the “Words, Beats, Life Festival” in Washington, D.C. where she observed a mural battle. She said, “It was amazing to watch the artists tackle their work at this scale. I immediately thought it would be an amazing experience to have my classes have the opportunity to create murals of their own.” With help from Dean of Innovation John David Bennett, the judges for the competition, and the Building and Grounds crew who built the mural flats, Pixler organized the battlefield.
Commarts students worked all day on their panels, first brainstorming and then creating, using house paint as well as spray paint. Because of the creative freedom that they enjoyed in developing their panels, they were able to generate a wide variety of artwork. Naeemah Winter, a member of the winning group along with Julee Rodgers, Ali Nurkhaidarov, and Daniel Mazo, created a panel depicting a girl regurgitating flowers. She said, “The mood is very trippy and surreal, and it is monochromatic besides the red accent color of the flowers.” Campbell Prentiss, part of the group that won second place, along with Peter Polega and Daanish Rashid, described his group’s panel as “an abstract creation of bright-colored shapes, representative of stain glass, in the background with a symbolic staircase in the middle of the piece.” Birdy McDonnell, worked on a panel with the theme of an alien abduction, using mainly regular paint with spray paint incorporated to emphasize lights and shading.
The two Commarts classes competed for the top class prize as well as the Overall Best Mural. However, while in the end the Mural Battle was a competition, the students were not overly focused on that aspect of the activity. McDonnell said, “Sure, in the end, it was a competition but throughout the day all the different groups, from both classes, were encouraging of each other and offering support the whole time.” While the students were all motivated to to their best, they did not measure their success by winning at the end of the day but instead by the successful process of planning and creating their panels.
Overall the Mural Battle inspired the seniors to embrace a new style of art. Prentiss said, “In the beginning, painting something so big seemed daunting, but with the help of the class and my teammates, Peter Polega and Daanish Rashid, we were able to produce a mural we were proud of.” Pixler said, “It was a great deal of physical work for the students but they enjoyed working in teams from concept to creation of each mural.”