Mapping Freire

For the 2013-14 school year, Mural Arts worked directly with teachers and students at Freire Charter School to develop an arts integrated curriculum for The Mapping Freire project. We sought to create a consistent narrative throughout their academic subjects using a public art project as the anchor. The goal of this initiative was to offer arts and design based programming where it didn’t exist before, reinforce academic content through the visual arts, as well as generate student photography for use in the design of a public mural project. The recurring themes were community and place, how Mural Arts defines them, how we define ourselves within them, and how schools define them.

The idea behind the mural design, to showcase the over 6000 photographs taken by students, artist Marcus Balum, and contributions via Instagram using the hashtag #mappingfreire, came out of conversations in the classroom between the artist, teachers, and students. It illustrated the idea that charter school communities are created not necessarily from students coming from the surrounding location of the school but from all over the city. The project illuminated the diversity of the student body through the varied places they see as they travel to and from school through a photographic cartography.

In tandem with the arts integration programming that was taught, lead artist Marcus Balum taught an after school program with 10–15 Freire students that was a more focused photographic campaign. They took field trips to places like City Hall and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and took weekly walking trips around the school to take photographs. The after school class also created digital collages of the artwork generated by students during the daytime classes to create prints that were displayed in the Mural Arts Program Art Education Department’s annual student exhibition.

The process used in the development of this mural project was a unique venture for the Mural Arts Program. It was a multimedia approach that primarily involved the use of large format printing. The substrate used to print was a metallic primed cloth. The prints were installed and then fine glazes of acrylic paint were used to intensify darks and saturate color. Coupled with the glazes that were applied, the reflective quality of the metallic surface collects the surrounding light and exaggerates the slight changes to the mural’s look depending on time of day, season, weather, and viewing angle. Truly representative of Freire’s student population and Philadelphia’s diverse neighborhoods, Mapping Freire is a stunning addition to Mural Arts’ expanding collection.