Mural #37
GM Elementary School
Reading, PA
Flowers #891 - #933 of 10,000
Completed October 2020
What is it like painting with the Ten Thousand Flowers Project?
Art teacher at Mifflin Park Elementary, Jonna Holgate, talks about her time working with the Ten Thousand Flowers Project.
This one was a long time coming…
We started plans for this installation back in September of 2019. I was on the road touring at the time when Jonna Holgate, the art teacher for the school, reached out about working on a mural. After several months of figuring out how we were going to install it without painting directly on the brick wall, we decided to break the mural up into sections of panel boards and reassemble them on the wall once the students had finished painting.
We set a painting date for the beginning of March! Well… that didn’t quite pan out as planned. It was less than a week before we were planning to paint that we received the news that the school would be temporaraly closing for 2 weeks due to the rising Covid numbers…
…32 weeks later, after what felt like a lifetime of TikTok dances, Zoom parties and binge watching the entirety of Netflix (she definitely fed her husband to a tiger by the way) we were ready to paint.
I spent a week cutting out and prepping the panels for our mural, loaded them into Petunia the wonder bus and headed over to Reading Pa. Normally when visiting a town, I set up home base in the nearest Walmart parking lot. This week however, Mark, one of the school teachers was kind enough to let me stay in his families’ fully renovated basement. Complete with shower, TV, kitchen and a warm bed. Luxuries that were far and few between when I was on the road. After dropping off the panels and getting a good nights sleep, we were ready for the first day of student painting. For obvious reasons, this was a very unique mural day. We of course wanted to make sure everybody was having a great time creating art, but the number one priority was that it was being done safely. We spread the panels out to a safe distance, made sure everyone was masked up, and hand sanitized every student that was given a paint brush.
The two days of painting flew by like a blur, we painted with just under 400 students during the school day and had special evening painting hours for student and families that were schooling from home. I couldn’t have been happier with the results. Jonna and I then spent the next two days touching up the flowers and outlining everything.
And that’s the story of the first post Covid flower project. I want to give a huge thank you to all of the faculty at Mifflin Park Elementary for making me feel so at home in your school. Thank you to all the students for your amazing painting skills. You guys knocked it out of the park! Thank you to Mark for giving me a place to sleep that wasn't a Walmart parking lot. And a HUGE thank you to Jonna Holgate. Getting to work with you and the students on this project was the highlight of my year!
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