 |  | Artist: Susan Thompson
Title: Let the Children Discover
Date: 1983-4
Materials: Appliqued fabric
Dimensions: 8' x 6' x 2"
Location: Suspended in the gymnasium For these fabric hangings, the creative process was just as important as the finished product. Thompson's goal was to involve the students at every stage of the artwork's development. She led a series of workshops in which children chose science, the arts, and sports as the central themes of the project. Next, the students interpreted those themes in colorful pencil and marker drawings. With their drawings as the "blueprints," the students then combined pieces of fabric to construct the banners.
Thompson received a degree in both Afro-American History and Visual Arts at Hunter College in New York. A resident of Boston, she views herself as a "community artist," leading open art workshops and participating in such neighborhood festivals as Boston's First Night and the Cambridge River Festival. She has taught at several Boston area schools and universities, and has executed numerous commissions including work for the Boston's MBTA subway system, the Boston Parks Commission, and the Afro-American History Museum. |
| | Artist: David Fichter
Title: Education is Liberation: The Rosa Parks Mural
Date: 1985
Materials: Acrylic on brick
Dimensions: 10' x 25'
Location: First floor hallway Fichter's large interior mural pays homage to Rosa Parks, one the school's two namesakes. Park's 1955 refusal to sit in the back of an Alabama bus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark event of the Civil Rights Movement. Fichter shows Parks telling her story to a group of school-children, whose diverse ethnicities not only reflect Cambridge's multi-cultural makeup but also embody the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement. Park's struggle for equal rights everywhere is represented by two opposing images: the chains of oppression and interlinked hands demonstrating the power of unity and resistance.
Fichter is a resident of Cambridge and has painted murals in the Eastern, Southern, and Midwestern United States, as well as in Nicaragua and in the former Soviet countries of Russia, Georgia and Armenia. Several of his works are located in other public spaces around Cambridge. |
 | | Artist: Judith Inglese
Title: I'd Hammer Out Love
Date: 1984
Materials: Ceramic
Dimensions: 4' 6" x 22' x 1/2"
Location: Exterior, front entrance As its title reveals, Judith Inglese's ceramic tile mural takes the Civil Rights-era folk song "If I Had a Hammer" as its inspiration. Just as the song celebrates "the love between my sisters and my brothers, all over this land" the artwork presents scenes of cross-cultural understanding. Children and adults from different backgrounds fly kites, make music, shoot basketball, admire butterflies and birds, climb and play on the structure, and share stories. Inglese's signature style borrows from the tradition of stained glass: irregular clay shapes form images, which, in turn, are outlined by grout, much like the way lead surrounds stained glass.
A Massachusetts resident, Inglese studied at Sarah Lawrence College, at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has received several grants for community based art workshops in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico. Her other public works include a 40 foot ceramic mural at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and pieces for numerous schools, recreational facilities, hospitals, transportation centers, libraries, and elderly housing.
Commissioned through the Cambridge Arts Council's Public Art Program.
|
