HAVERHILL — Students in the after-school Discovery Club, sponsored by Haverhill's public schools, have worked with several local artists over the past three years to produce public art, including murals on downtown buildings.
They helped create Merry Mac, one of the giant shoes featured in the Soles of Haverhill Shoe-la-Bration last year. The shoes were auctioned off in the fall and raised thousands of dollars for local charities. Now, they have focused their attention on a different kind of mural.
Students in the Discovery Clubs at Nettle, Whittier and Consentino middle schools are transforming bare walls into colorful works of art.
Students at Whittier recently completed their mural and were inspired by John Greenleaf Whittier's poem, "The Barefoot Boy." They transformed a section of hallway wall outside their gymnasium with a scene of the Whittier Birthplace and farm with Whittier as a barefoot boy and as a grown man.
"It's the biggest canvas I ever worked on," said eighth-grader William Martinez, one of eight students in Whittier's Discovery Club, who worked with professional artist Elizabeth Persing. "It's fun to be given a free hand to paint on such a large canvas, although it was hard painting near areas other kids were working on."
Discovery Club director Tina Fuller said previous ideas for public art displays originated with Team Haverhill and were paid for by grants from the Haverhill Cultural Council.
"This year we were awarded $2,790 from the cultural council to do three more murals, this time inside our three middle schools," Fuller said.
But rather than responding to designs approved by Team Haverhill's Public Art Committee, students brainstormed and came up with the topics for the murals themselves. Persing helped them put those ideas into designs.
"I love art and I wanted to create something that would be noticed around the school," Whittier seventh-grader Courtney Mitchell said. "We all took our favorite lines from the poem ('The Barefoot Boy') and put those images into the painting. This was my favorite Discovery Club project in the last two years."
They marked the mural with creatures in the poem, including a tortoise and an oriole nesting in a tree. And there's the barefoot boy dipping his fishing line into Fernside Brook, which flows through the historic property. Whittier fifth-grader William Karantonis said he signed up for the project because loves art and thought it would be "pretty cool" to make a mural. "It was good to be able to paint on a school wall, considering we weren't going to get in trouble for it," William said.
The eight student artists signed their painting in the bottom right corner and each can point to areas of the mural for which they were responsible.
"I painted the frog, the road, and I touched up the grass," said sixth-grader Jamian Figueroa. "I think it came out good."
William Martinez said he hopes his artwork will last far beyond his time at Whittier.
"Our assistant principal (Brendon Parker) said they might keep it as it brightens up the hall," he said.
Fuller said Nettle students worked with Persing to create a colorful mural featuring different sports. Their canvas was a curved wall at the entrance to their gymnasium. Students in Consentino's Discovery Club are working with Persing to come up with a theme for their mural.
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