The Art Club has taken off with a mission to make FHC a more comfortable place for students to be. In past years, the club had always painted a mural somewhere around the school. This year the Art Club decided to pick up from where the previous year left off: the Media Center.
The club is run by the president senior Sofia Terry, and vice president senior Claire Mast. Sofia and Claire came together and decided to add on to the mural that last year’s Art Club had not yet finished.
“The Art Club is really about adding murals to our school walls because we want to make it a place where all the students want to hang out and be inspired and make it less drab or not as hard to be in,” Sofia said. “When you have color around you and inspiration it just makes it easier to focus.”
The mural that the club is currently working on was passed down to them because it was not fully completed last year. The mural is still a work in progress in the Media Center. So far, it is a beautiful piece that displays different types of book genres that can be seen through windows.
“Every piece of the mural is a window, and each window is looking into a different genre of books since it is in the library,” Sofia said. “So we have historical non-fiction, then romance, manga, fantasy, mystery, LGBTQ+ and diversity books, fairy tales, and then horror books.”
The Art Club has been making a large impact on the students by making the school environment a more beautiful one. The goal is to allow students to thrive and be the best they can be in order to make school a little more enjoyable.
For sophomore London Castro, a member of the Art Club, spending time with friends and getting to know new people while creating art is what she enjoys most about the club.
“I like how the club is chill and you can paint what you like,” London said. “I chose it because I like to do art in my free time and take art classes, so I feel like after school the club is a nice way to calm me down and spend time with friends. I’m mostly excited to finish up what we’re doing in the library and see everyone’s finished painting; I think it will be really cool to see.”
The Art Club hopes to bring students together through art. They also allow students to express their creativity which can be difficult to do in some classes. To get into the club there are no requirements or commitments. This allows the club to feel less like every other class and more like a time to bond over art with friends and peers.
The Art Club is a fun experience for students to express themselves in imaginative ways that they don’t always get to do in their day-to-day classes. The club is very hands-on, as everyone in the club gets to have a part in painting the mural in the library. The club gives students a break from school and offers them something to look forward to on Wednesdays after school.
“[I enjoy the art club because] I get to hang out with friends that I don’t always have classes with or that I don’t have time to interact with outside of school,” Claire said.
Future projects in the next couple of years will include many more murals to come. There are various blank walls around the school that the Art Club hopes to make colorful, vibrant, and more visually appealing.
These lifeless walls all over the school tend to negatively impact students by making the school seem almost not welcoming. By eliminating the emptiness of the plain white walls, the Art Club plans to let students focus and even make school that much more enjoyable.
“A lot of teachers reached out and said they wanted murals in their classrooms or in the hallways where it is just really blank, so hopefully next year we’ll continue to make murals around the school to make it a better place,” Sofia said. “We have talked about painting murals in the senior staircase since it is completely white on all three sides. It was discussed that we may do a mural there, but we decided it was too large of a scale at the moment. This mural was started last year by a student not in Art Club who gave it up, so we took it over to finish it so they didn’t have to repaint the whole wall. So this was kind of given to us, or handed down so we’re finishing it. Otherwise, we probably would have been doing the staircase.”
Although the main focus of the club is to make murals and spread creativity and inspiration throughout the school, the ultimate goal is to bond through art. The Art Club provides students with a safe space to express themselves through art. The members of the club are given time to connect with each other and spread their passion for art together.
“We are hoping to just add some life to the school because there are a lot of beige walls, so we are really hoping to help with that,” Claire said. “We also want to give people a place to connect with their friends.”
