By Julia Ben-Asher
Students in Dr. Bonnie Winfield’s First-Year Seminar “Taking it to the Street: The Theory and Practice of Community Arts in Urban America” paint a mural to be hung in Easton’s City Hall. The mural features flowers, a neighborhood, small people working together to paint, and a leopard with maroon spots.
“Taking it to the Streets: The Theory and Practice of Community Arts in Urban America,” taught by Director of the Landis Community Outreach Center Bonnie Winfield, takes a slight different approach compared with other first-year seminars.
The usual textbooks and writing assignments focus with sociological perspectives on how urban art, whether painted murals or sporadic sculptures, changes a community and the people in it. Besides the typical “academic” materials, though, the class, now in its fourth year of being offered, utilizes many of Easton’s active and hands-on learning opportunities.
The class worked as the volunteer team for Movies at the Mill, attended the Riverside Arts Festival and supported several Williams Center for the Arts presentations. Now, they will give back in a more tangible and permanent way: painting a mural semi-abstractedly depicting the Easton community, to be hung in Easton’s City Hall.
With Winfield’s encouragement, the class broke into three groups and each designed a potential mural outline. The class then reconvened, the three designs were merged into one and main ideas of the future mural were born.
The design was penciled onto a large strip of canvas, about 6′ by 15′. For two Wednesday classes, the group of 15 students took Easton’s shuttle down the hill to Winfield’s work space of #9 North
Second Street, a cozy room with its street-facing walls made of glass. The room is covered in yarn weavings and abstract paintings and crayon drawings, products of the program Winfield hosts for formerly incarcerated women now on work release.
There, the students worked for hours, painting and chatting and singing. This past Wednesday, the mural was completed.
Green grass and vibrant flowers scatter the lower part. A row of bright houses, the closest of neighbors, sits under big yellow stars and a swirling violet sky. Small, simple people of all different tones hug paint brushes twice their height and work together to paint their surroundings. A leopard saunters down a hill with a paintbrush wrapped in its tail.
“It looks amazing,” Winfield admired. “And it was amazing experience.”
“This will be something that unifies Lafayette and Easton. The leopard is not being overpowering but is being beneficial at the same time,” said Sean Courtney ‘15. “Easton and Lafayette are coming together to make it possible. This wasn’t a Lafayette College project, it was an Easton community project.” He believes that the mural will further unify the hill and the lower grounds around it.
The class agreed that they feel more knowledgeable about the community and city of Easton after having participated in the class. “I feel more comfortable going into Easton,” said Tim Gaziano ’15. The Farmer’s Market is a favorite of his, shared enthusiastically by the rest of the class.
The class agreed that while only about half of the members had had experience with art before enrolling in the FYS, this seminar was a first choice and they were thrilled to have gotten in. “And you become an artist through being in the class,” Winfield added.
“This is probably the most fun I’ve had in a class, ever,” Sonny Round ‘15 said. “We all kind of knew each other before, but after the mural, we all became really good friends.”
The class is planning to hang the mural in Farinon before it makes its way to City Hall.