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Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn loves a mural, and during a recent School Committee meeting promised a group of students she’d take a selfie with the new mural at Medford High School.
The students, along with Director of Fine and Performing Arts Suzanne Fee, were at the Medford School Committee meeting on Sept. 28 for the Mustang Moment, presenting how the five-panel project came to fruition.
Called “At Our Core,” the mural is the second such project done during the summer through funding from the Center for Citizenship and Social Responsibility (CCSR) and the Cummings Foundation.
Fee said seven students participated in this year’s project, a week-long activity led and orchestrated by Fee and teacher Jennifer Belanger.
“This year’s mural is very Medford focused and tied very closely to our core values at the school,” Fee said.
Students Jack Mastromatteo, Tuomos Ronni, Lillian Scholfield, Bronwyn Somorok and Tristan Ingano gave a presentation to the School Committee about the mural. Douglas Casey and Aya Najjar, who also worked on the project, were not in attendance.
The mural
Mastromatteo told the School Committee the new mural represents “who we are as students at Medford High School and what makes our community special.”
He said the goal was to show pride in the school and the community while highlighting the values students and staffers live at MHS: respect, responsibility, empathy, and kindness.
“We wanted the mural to be something people look at and immediately recognize the parts of the school and community,” Scholfield said. “We also wanted the symbols to have deeper meaning. We researched different symbols from different cultures and thought about how they connect to our values.”
She said students were inspired by artist Shepard Fairey, especially his “bold, graphic style and use of symbols and strong visual imagery.”
“This mural isn’t just about making the hallway look better,” Scholfield said. “It’s really about telling the story of who we are.”
That story took a lot planning. Somorok said students researched and sketched and worked out their ideas until they had something they felt was right for MHS and the community.
The district’s buildings and grounds workers primed the wall for painting. Sketches were projected using digital tools, Ronni explained, and then traced onto panels.
Students then talked about what the symbols on the five panels meant, including the handshake (not only respect, but if you shake someone’s hand, you don’t have a hidden weapon); the Mustang (the school mascot and a symbol of partnership and mutual respect in Native American culture); doves (peace); and the endless knot (a Dharmic symbol of interwoven wisdom and compassion).
There’s even a handwritten snippet from “Over the River and Through the Woods,” by Medford’s own Lydia Marie Child, abolitionist, feminist leader and Native American rights activist.
What do the symbols on the panels mean? Here is a look. COURTESY PHOTOS/Suzanne Fee
“When you put all five panels together, the mural becomes more than just a collection of images,” Scholfield said. “It’s a combination of our school, our city, our history, different cultures and values we want to see in our community
“We hope that when people walk past the mural, they don’t just see something colorful on the wall,” she continued. “We hope they stop for a second, think about what the symbols mean, and maybe even recognize something that connects to them personally.”
Erika Reinfeld, who attended Curriculum Night, said she walked by the mural with some other parents and residents and was floored by the work.
“This is stunning,” she said. “The people I was with, we were just taken aback. It looks even better than in the photos.”
