East Grand Rapids — With each snip of the scissors, and with every placement of every paper cutout, eighth-graders at East Grand Rapids Middle School are making their mark on their community.
Holly Lampen’s art students are closing in on completion of a yearlong project to design and place three similarly themed murals — one for the middle-school hallway, and two for the Teen Room walls at the Kent District Library East Grand Rapids branch. The hallway mural is already on display, as is one of the two at the library. Students are just wrapping up the third mural now, hoping to see it installed at the library sometime in June.
A partnership between the Friends of the EGR Library, the middle school PTO and the EGR Schools Foundation has allowed Lampen to bring in one of her former students, Disney artist Dylan Bonner, to help bring the project to fruition.
At the start of the project, Bonner, Lampen and the students settled on a theme: nature-inspired interpretations of plant life seen at Reeds Lake. Each mural starts as a paper collage. Once it’s all put together, it’s scanned and sent to Icon Sign for printing.
“With doing art as a career, so much of it is digital, so I do like showing kids that you can do something traditional … and it can be a tangible piece of art,” Bonner said. “(They can) get it off their screens and into a space.”
Eighth-grader Suki Dutta said the process helps students frame and contextualize some of what they’ve learned in class.
“It kind of correlates to how we’re learning about color, and how you can take plant life and move it into abstract interpretations of the plant life that we were observing,” she said.
For Suki, the highlight of it all has been “finally seeing it come together,” both in the middle school hallway and at the library.
‘Perfectionism — there’s definitely a time and a place for it, but fun art like this, it’s not the place.’
— Disney artist Dylan Bonner
Just ‘Vibes’
Bonner stops by periodically to work with students on the project. During a recent visit, he observed as Suki and her fellow eighth-graders Catherine Sowerby, Nadia Fuller, Aiden Znuda, Bennett Flermoen and Jack Rohn each continued to add new shapes to the third mural’s design.
“I like working with him,” Aiden said of Bonner. “He’s very creative and I like his ideas.”
And Bonner feels the same way about the students. He marveled at the creativity and variety they brought to the leaf-like shapes they created.
“You’ve done three of these so far, and honestly I think each one is getting more and more interesting,” he told Catherine Sowerby after viewing her latest cutout.
One of the main lessons Bonner wants to impart to students is the value of getting out of their own heads and giving themselves up to the process.
“Perfectionism — there’s definitely a time and a place for it, but fun art like this, it’s not the place,” he said. “You’re just kind of going with vibes. It’s just about allowing yourself to kind of zone out. … You can kind of go into autopilot, and I think that’s where you can really be your most creative.”
‘An authentic audience’
Lampen said the entire project has been invaluable to the students.
“I love that the kids have an authentic audience. They’re not just making stuff that’s going to maybe end up in the recycling bin or hanging on their own refrigerator at home, but it’s for our greater community, which is really just an awesome experience,” she said. “They get more involved in the project and feel a lot of ownership when they see their individual piece as part of a larger mural.”
What’s more, she said, “They can walk up and say, ‘I made that.’ Ten years from now they can stop by and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I remember cutting out that leaf!’”
Lampen said Bonner’s presence and guidance bring out the best in the students, who are keen to impress a professional artist.
“And the kids have such a buy-in when it’s going to be in front of a wider audience,” she added. “They just want to give it their best.”
Read more from East Grand Rapids:
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• Aspiring thespian helps younger students find joy in theater
