Field Trip: Whittier Community Mural
For my first outing I went to see the newly painted mural on the exterior of Treehouse Records, located at 26th Street and Lyndale Avenue in the Whittier neighborhood of South Minneapolis.
The mural came together through collaboration between MCAD, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Whittier Alliance. Those organizations convened a couple dozen Whittier kids to brainstorm and sketch ideas of what neighborhood and community meant to them.
Melodee Strong, an MCAD alumna, then coordinated rendering the kids’ sketches into a cohesive mural design (concept sketch pictured above).
The actual painting took place during the Open Streets Minneapolis: Lyndale Avenue event on June 4. Anyone attending that event could lend a hand in filling the mural out.
This is a great example of collaborative creation and community building. Art institutions teamed with neighborhood leaders and an historic record store to create a lasting and important work. To me, it represents the sort of community that we as educators ought to foster in our classrooms. Through an eLearning lens I think we can draw inspiration for the type of collaboration we’re seeking to facilitate.
