Topeka Rotary, Highland Park High School partner for Freedom Festival mural project – Topeka Capital Journal

With summer break in full swing, recruiting students to return to school for a project seems almost impossible.

But through team work, communication and a passion for the project at hand, Highland Park High School art teacher Amy Cline has recruited a handful of students to assist in the next stage of a semester-long art project.

In preparation for the Freedom Festival on Saturday, July 1, the Topeka Rotary partnered with Highland Park to discuss what freedom means to its students. Cline worked with high-schoolers and the schools English department during the spring to gather students poems and turn their words into chalk-paint murals decorating the windows of the former Ray Beers clothing store at 8th and S. Kansas Avenue.

With a healthy sheen of sweat covering their faces in the mid-day heat, Highland Park students Kathy, 16, and Quaysha, 15, worked diligently to perfect the G in their mural. Their piece, one of five, uses the Webster definition of freedom for their first installation. Poems describing the students definitions of freedom will appear beneath it.

The one-day, pop-up art experience invites people of all ages to explore what freedom and democracy mean on a personal level.

I put the topic out there with some general questions like what is freedom? And then we went on to the next step of the kids talking about what freedom looks like to them, Cline said. So we tried to peel away the layers and get them into some of these deeper topics.

Cline said discussions surrounded race, gender, age and where the kids live. Highland Park has a reputation for being perceived as dangerous, Cline said. She said her students have a different perspective on freedom than other students, with differences also appearing between freshmens and seniors views.

They suffer from a low self-perception also, and the rest of the city sees them that way as well, so how do you start correcting that? Carol Bradbury, CEO of Bloomerang Studios LLC and an organizer of the Freedom Festival mural project, said of the students. Value the experience of what theyre bringing to the table thats one way.

The students work impressed Cline.

We had some kids that were just really kind of blowing me away with some of the insightful thoughts that they were willing to share with their peers, she said.

Quaysha, a sophomore, was straightforward in her poetry, drawing parallels between the freedoms of a person in prison and one who is free.

Bradbury said she often works with the community for input on various art installations, and interacting with students tends to be a hopeful experience. Through this project, she hopes they will generate excitement and interest in a growing downtown through public engagement, increase community pride and a sense of ownership in Topeka, promote democratic values of diversity and freedom, and provide a creative, intergenerational experience.

Its kind of like a tapestry with all these different pieces that the kids have contributed that are going to show up, Cline said. What looks like a handful of kids and myself and FHLBank members applying paint to the windows, but really theres so much thats led up to this point, and thats really the coolest part.

Members of the community are invited to help paint the windows July 1 while enjoying the art and entertainment in downtown Topeka.

For more information, visit the Rotary Freedom Festival Facebook event page.

Contact reporter Savanna Maue at (785) 295-5621 or @SavannaMaue on Twitter.

Read the rest here:

Topeka Rotary, Highland Park High School partner for Freedom Festival mural project - Topeka Capital Journal