Newest Project

Newest Project for True Colors: REALM Charter School

ENROLL NOW AT BERKELEY CITY COLLEGE FOR SPRING SEMESTER 2012

AND PAINT THE MURAL AT THE REALM SCHOOL

Alvin Jefferson with Utopian Tent City Detail of REALM Mural Design, and Jennifer Bloomer with Tania Pulido Portrait

Instructor: Juana Alicia Araiza Class Hours: 2-6:00 Mondays and Wednesdays Art Studio 514 and on site at REALM School
Contact Info: juanaaliciam@gmail.com 510 978-1060

True Colors at REALM Charter School, West Berkeley, CA

Final color rendering of twin students at Realm, playing Mancala

Close up of Robot over the projection board.

Color version of the Realm Computer Geek

A color version of the heart warming family

True Colors’ 2011-2012 Mural Project is a collaboration with REALM Charter School. True Colors has created an environmental “Game Board” mural with a virtual component that is being developed with REALM art instructor Tirso Araiza and the students of both the sixth and ninth grade classes. The process of research, design and the creation for this year’s mural involves multiple collaborations with REALM’s students, parents, teachers and the community as a whole.

The Realm Charter School is dedicated to design-based critical thinking, and every month, the students and faculty work in teams to resolve a specific “design challenge”. The virtual game board mural is a “design challenge” project that has been incorporated in REALM’s curricula. Community outreach is being conducted to involve audience participation in the creation, presentation and display of the project. Community members participate in both conceptualizing the content of the mural and then by playing the virtual board game. This project intends to immerse the audience to navigate complex information utilizing emerging technologies. The audience not only views the mural, but plays with the design that becomes an actual living experience and on-line journey. The issues and messages chosen for this mural impact people’s everyday lives and encourage the community to take positive social action. It will educate the students and community about ideas and practice leading to environmental sustainability. It is our hope that through this project, all participants will recognize and activate their ability to shape our world and to better humanity.

Lynn Orlando’s REALM Mural Design

In this mural, we address issues regarding social and environmental justice through use of an interactive game that educates the students of West Berkeley’s REALM Charter School about the injustices of their society, while encouraging and promoting the idea that young people in the community can make global changes in the world. The following is a detailed description of the imagery, moving across the 91’ x 11’ surface of the student lounge wall, from left to right. The journey across the board is a contemporary visual and virtual Alice in Ecoland, with fantasy game pieces, robots, images of traditional games from around the world, sites of environmental challenges, and QR codes (visual hyperlinks that you to a website when you scan them into your phone). The wall is broken up into seven panels, separated by posts along its length.

Cristina Puncsak gridding a section of the design to create her canvas painting blowup

Miguel Morales and David Castañeda gridding their details for canvas paintings

Panel 1.

We are first welcomed into this interactive game by the passion fruit blossom, an edible flower indigenous to West Berkeley. Passion fruit flowers are used in various ways in many countries around the world, and can be seen all over Berkeley, at the U.C. Berkeley Botanical Garden and the San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. SF Botanical Garden is also free to visit every last Tuesday of the month. More info…

The mural’s flower is being pollinated by a honeybee, a creature that is currently facing the reality of possible extinction, which would upset the earth’s ecosystem indefinitely. More info…

Above the flower, we see a hand getting ready to place it’s game piece onto the board, opening the game. The game piece is in the form of a Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookie, an iconic image protesting the use of Palm Oil in Girl Scout Cookies. This pays tribute to Girl Scouts activists Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva, two girls that successfully pressured the Girl Scouts of America to remove palm oil from their cookies in order to help save the rainforest. More info…

Students begin our game with a “Fresh Start”, expressing the need for children getting a new start at middle school age after struggling to make it through the Berkeley Unified Schools and neighboring public school systems. More info..

Panel 2

As we follow the robotic game piece further into the design, we are met with a factory setting in the upper background. The left side of this scene pays homage to the revolutionary muralist Diego Rivera’s commentary on and depiction of the industrial revolution. Rivera, along with Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alvaro Siqueiros, are three of the muralists that True Colors mural class studies during the design process of creating our murals. This is a link to a video that we have all watched about Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals.

The continued industrial scene we have an artistic rendering of Pacific Steel Casting in Richmond, Ca. This is the company responsible for much of the pollution that directly effects the community, as well as the students of West Berkeley. More info…

As we follow the game board into the 2nd panel, we see a group of children playing Hamesh Avanim, a popular strategy board game played in Israeli culture. Next, we meet by Tania Pulido, Brower Youth Award winner for promoting healthy living through sustainable community gardens. Trickling into the next panel, are the California poppies, the state flower, which was also considered a natural source of food and oil for the California Native American Indians.

Panel 3.

This robot, along with many other robots and characters in the mural, was designed by Duncan Russell, a local Bay Area artist and student in the mural class.

Panel 4.

If we continue to flow back onto the game board, we see another one of Duncan’s character’s looking at a REALM Charter School laptop as the board flows though one ear and out the other. REALM Charter School is the future home of this mural design, and is one of the most innovative charter schools in education today.Along the top of these panels we see some fun characters hopping through portals and asking some questions. Below, on the other side of the character’s ears, we see the California Quail, our state bird.

Panels 4 and 5.

To the right of the quail we are met by the twins, actual 6th grade students attending REALM Charter School. Due to the fact that Realm uses games to teach students, we incorporated Mancala, the oldest strategy game in Africa. Each one of the twins has an individual shirt educating the students on various environmental issues. The twin on the left has a shirt paying tribute to the Black Rhino. The twin on the right has a shirt protesting the pollution of lead in our soillocally all over the Bay Area.

Panel 5.

As we begin to move forward we are met by a stylized version of the great blue whale, a whale that has been on the verge of extinction for years, due to whale hunting. When we follow the water, we are lead into the tent city, a place where students can leave rooftop designs to be considered when creating our next mural projects.On the far right info tent we see that the tent cities can contribute to society in variety of ways.When we travel to the other side of the river bank, we see a young version of environmental rights activist Julia Butterfly, who became famous for protesting the destruction of redwood trees by sitting in one for almost a year. She currently fights for environmental justice all over the world and is now promoting the idea of “disposability consciousness”.

Panel 6

Following the path into the next panel, we see a soaring frog, similar to the soaring lady in Diego Rivera’s Stock Exchange Mural in San Francisco. By the bay, beneath the ship we see two men: the one on the left is a young David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute. Widely considered one of the environmental leaders with the greatest global impact, the late David Brower was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. True Colors Mural Project is a project of Earth Island Institute, an organization that sponsors over sixty international organizations that work for environmental justice and sustainability.Next to David, a man plays a guitar. His back patch displays a portrait of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Panel 7