Latin American Project
Mural:

Reed's Group

                 
   
Group Members:
-Nick A.
-Laura B.
-Sean B.
-Allison P.
-Clarissa H.
 group picture
                                         
                                                                                  
                                    
         

Our mural group had many challenges to overcome when it came to expressing our classes' theme, "Global Power is a Question of Balance" through art. One of the first things they decided was what symbols to use and how to use them together to show what they wanted. One of the first symbols they selected was the main focus of the mural as a scale weighing the objects representing tradition in Latin America on one side, and on the other side, oil and pollution representing modernization brought to Latin America through globalization. Later the rest of the mural was sketched out onto an overhead and projected onto an 8x4 foot board and traced over. The next step for this creative group was to start painting! After many days and layers of paint the end result was a mural that displayed multiple symbols intertwined to represent our theme. The first symbol to catch your eye is the scale located in the middle of the mural which is balanced on the long hand of a clock to show that this process didn't just happen like that, but slowly changed over a long period of time.   Another aspect of the scale symbol is a globe suspended under the globalization side of the scale that is slowly spilling the oil and pollution it contains. "The globe is there to show how the oil spilling from the basket representing globalization is slowly spreading to Latin America" says one of the group members, Nick A. The next symbol in this mural to catch your eye is the two different sides, modernization (represented by big buildings and pollution) and tradition (represented by the Aztec calendar and traditional native Latin American housing). A half sun/half moon looks over the two different worlds and shows how they are separate, sitting in a red sky that fades out to the edges of the mural, to show how the two different worlds collide in the middle and all the blood that has been spilled. One last symbol that you might miss at first glance is three black figures on the traditional side of the mural jumping up towards the basket.  The hope for this symbol was to show how there are some people who are trying to balance out the scale, giving some power back to the people and the old traditions. The whole effect of the mural is to show how the balance of global power is favored towards more modern/developed groups.


students tracing                                             starting to paint
     Group sketching outline                                         Allison and Clarissa using a taping technique

                                              image projected onto board                                             painting sky
                                                     Final outline for mural                                                          Let the painting begin!

Back