In a new indoor mural in Northampton, a dove holding an olive branch flies past a rainbow and a rising sun as a river flows through mountains underneath. The mountains stand tall in front of a patchwork of green and brown fields as a tree sprouts leaves in a rainbow of colors and patterns. Nearby, a painted vine of leaves adds color to a hallway, stretching the length of the building.
But the tree is actually a stylized Torah scroll, and the mural isn’t just for decoration: it’s a way to celebrate the landscape of western Massachusetts and help students at Lander Grinspoon Academy, a Jewish day school, connect with Jewish tradition and build community.
“We wanted our school building to be more beautiful and reflect all of the art that we do here, and we wanted something that everyone could participate in,” said Rabbi April Davis, the school’s director of administration. “This really is a community where everybody pitches in and we all create it together, and we wanted our art to reflect that as well.”
The mural was created in collaboration with school administrators, staff, alumni and students and Jewish artist Rosana Azar, who is originally from Argentina and is currently based in Silver Spring, Maryland. Azar runs a nonprofit, after-school art education program called, “Creative Adventures,” and has developed similar community-style murals as far away as Spain, Tanzania and Argentina. She came to Lander Grinspoon because she’d led a mural project at a Jewish community center in San Francisco, and a staff member who’d worked at the San Francisco center before coming to Lander Grinspoon had her in mind for this project.
“It was a wonderful collaboration,” Azar said. “Everybody was very helpful and excited about this, and it was a pleasure to be in Northampton.”
As part of the project, Azar came to the school for a week after the Jewish high holidays, starting on a Sunday, during which the broader school community, including students, parents, alumni and friends of the school, painted at least one leaf; most people painted more than one. Faculty members had already offered suggestions for what the mural should entail, and both faculty members and members of the school’s board of directors painted the leaves that appear in the auditorium where the mural is.
“It was a great afternoon,” Davis said.
During the week, Azar visited each class and helped them paint large sheets of parachute paper in warm and cool colors, which Azar then cut into vine shapes that now decorate the school’s first-floor hallway. The oldest students had the opportunity to paint the first base coat of the mural.
“They just love[d] it. They wanted to go up on the scaffolding, but I was like, no way!” Azar laughed. “Then it’s a little too much. But it was wonderful because they all wanted to be part of it, and every kid did something for it.”
In fact, Azar created the design with the intent of giving the school community “ownership of the images,” she said.
“I don’t like to impose my ideas, even though I’m an artist and I create my own artwork,” she said. “I’ve been doing a lot of different murals around the world, and that’s my approach, that I always ask people what they would like to see, because this is their space, and they have to have ownership over what image we will create.”
The design’s connection to Jewish tradition comes with the presence of the mountains: a Jewish worship service is structured “like climbing a mountain,” Davis said, and the school’s teachers created a design that explained the concept visually to their students. Azar’s design is a simplified version, but it still “speaks to the experience of Jewish liturgy,” Davis said.
Likewise, the mural image is of a morning because Judaism has a series of morning prayers that express gratitude, called shacharit. Lander Grinspoon has a weekly tradition of celebrating gratitude: every Monday morning, students, teachers and staff gather together to sing a gratitude prayer composed by music teacher Aram Rubinstein Gillis, then four students share what they’re grateful for.
“In a very specific way also, this image is exactly how our school expresses gratitude,” Davis said.
“The mural is really a representation of how much we value each other and our expression of ourselves in the world, and how much we come together to create a beautiful community,” Davis added, “and now we have that on our walls.”