Schools, as a rule, abound with art: with crayon drawings and self portraits of curious proportions and lavish streaks of paint on paper curling at the edges. Amid the profusion, it’s easy to miss something new.
But not this.
In the library at Marion Cross School in Norwich, a 50-foot mural now wraps around three walls above a set of bookshelves, depicting vivid nature scenes from nearby places. To the school community, those scenes have special meaning: They represent yearly traditions embedded in the school’s place-based learning curriculum.
“This is just like a stroll down memory lane for them,” said school librarian Joy Blongewicz, who conceived of the mural idea and secured a $4,500 grant from the nonprofit Friends of Hanover-Norwich Schools to commission local artist Katie Runde to paint it. “It gives them an opportunity to reflect on what they’ve studied.”
Painted across six plywood panels, the mural, which was installed last month, spans the seasons and captures the range of habitats the students explore during their time at the K-6 school, as part of the school’s place-based education program. It shows first-graders trotting across a meadow near the school, second-graders gathered at the edge of Blood Brook, fourth-graders poking around a vernal pool and fifth-graders canoeing on the Connecticut River.
And, in keeping with the school curriculum’s focus on habitats, each scene is packed with wildlife: white-tailed deer, black bears, red-winged blackbirds, toads. Someone at the school started counting animals and got as high as 40, Blongewicz said.
Blongewicz got the idea for a mural a few years ago and began discussing it with school staff, who collectively decided on the habitat theme. To secure the grant, they devised ways they’d use it in their teaching. Blongewicz, for example, will have third-graders search for books related to each habitat using the online catalog and then create displays on the shelves beneath the mural.
“I think it contributes to learning for everybody,” said Blongewicz, who invited the community in for an opening reception earlier this month. “It’s just one more way of synthesizing information.”
Runde, who lives in Bethel and has a studio in White River Junction, created the mural with oil paints, using photographs of the school’s various place-based learning activities through the years.
Primarily a portrait artist who also likes to make small still-lifes — her current favorite subject is dessert — Runde said the project took her out of her comfort zone.
“I finally had to get over my phobia of foliage,” Runde, 34, said in a telephone interview earlier this week.
Another challenge was connecting the panels, a feat that required not just lining up the elements in the mural but also creating fluent transitions from place to place and season to season.
The animals in the mural were “a little vacation” from the large swaths of landscape, Runde said. A few of them were special requests from student representatives who met with her early in the process of planning the mural.
In spite of the challenges, the project resonated with Runde, who grew up in upstate New York and studied folklore, music and theology, worked on a dairy farm, taught at a Waldorf school and apprenticed under artist Evan Wilson before opening her studio in 2017.
“I loved studying the biomes when I was a kid,” said Runde, who is currently a postulate for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church and enjoys imbuing her art with deeper meaning.
Runde also sees value in creating pieces that the public can enjoy. Last year, she completed a mural of a farm landscape at the Bethel Area Food Shelf, a project that required her to contort into a variety of odd poses to paint around the stairs.
“I like public art in that it’s accessible to everyone. It’s nice to know that the pieces will be seen by a lot of people,” she said.
Runde also does sidewalk chalk art and snow sculptures for festivals. Those events allow people to see her works in progress, which she hopes serves an inspirational purpose.
“I think it’s good for people to see that this is a process. It doesn’t look perfect right away,” Runde said. “It’s just a matter of trusting the process.”
For young people, who are still testing and exploring their own artistic skills, seeing art up close may have an especially powerful effect.
Blongewicz’s favorite reaction to the mural so far came from a third-grader visiting the library shortly after the installation. “He stopped dead in his tracks,” Blongewicz said, “And he said, ‘Wow. Wow. Yeah.’ And he walked away.”
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.