Murals a natural medium for Keene State community art class

“With that prompt, the students sort of took photographs and then drew some images from those photographs,” said Lambert, of Peterborough, who noted several students had environmental science backgrounds and wanted to illustrate the natural world.

The walled works of art were the culmination of Lambert’s “Art in the Community” class, a 20-student semester-long exploration of exhibiting art in public areas and collaborating with community organizations to display their work. Five classmates were ultimately selected to create public art murals on plywood that can now be seen on the building at 48 Emerald St. in Keene, which houses Brewbakers Café, entertainment space Nova Arts and music record business Keene on Vinyl.

The project began with the whole class developing concept drawings and designs at an 8-by-10-inch scale with those chosen needing to upscale their work to 4-by-8 feet. She said the five works of art took students each about three weeks to create from start to finish.

Among the five muralists was Sierra Winand, a junior majoring in studio art and graphic design, who said she was captivated by greenery in the area and the shapes of windows on campus, in downtown Keene and around the Emerald Street building.

Her mural features the outline of an arch window with silhouettes of tree branches with squirrels on them through the window’s blue, brown and green panes, which she said are two examples of patterns.

“I merged these patterns to weave around each other in such a way where there is no discernible inside and outside of the window to showcase their unique features and play with perspective,” said Winand, 20, of Meriden.

Winand said she was also inspired by Maryland artist Teddy Johnson’s 2021 piece titled, “Offering,” in which two people’s arms are outstretched and the only visible part of their bodies in the canvas, offering each other flowers in front of a blue-striped backdrop.

“[ ‘Offering’ ] also seems to highlight the contrast between manmade stripes versus naturally occurring shapes,” Winand said. “The background of my proposal features tones from the sky … as well as from the surrounding bricks. … The squirrels in the trees offer some playfulness to the featured bold line and shape and a connection to the environment that surrounds Nova Arts.”

Another artist in Lambert’s class was Cassidy Carlson, 20, of Blue Hill, Maine. Carlson entered Keene State as an environmental studies major minoring in art but is now majoring solely in studio art.

Carlson, who uses she/they pronouns, created a mural titled, “Stone Path,” which depicts a canvas of multicolored stones with yellow eyes peeking from in between cracks and crevices.

“Emily wanted us to go throughout Keene and take pictures of natural patterns we found, and I found gravelly, biggish stones on the side of sidewalks,” she said. “… I got the idea that there’s stone pathways like sidewalks we all kind of walk on, so it’s like a lining of our day-to-day life. I wanted to add color to it because everybody who walks is a different kind of person and adding the color kind of added, in my way, a sense of diversity and difference of people.”

Carlson said they added eyes to the piece to create a whimsical and intriguing visual of creatures among the pebbles. She said she was pleasantly surprised classmates chose the piece to be among the few displayed along the Brewbakers and Nova Arts building.

“It’s a very surreal experience and feeling to see your art on the side of a building and it’s a coffee shop a lot of people go to,” Carlson said.

As Winand, Carlson and three other students — Chase Gengras, Aidan Urnezis and Liam McGuire — each produced their own murals, 10 students in the course took on a separate final project where they painted elm leaf-shaped canvases, an idea Lambert and student Sofia El Hakim developed during the fall semester as Hakim interned for area nonprofit Arts Alive.

“It was Sofia’s whole idea that the elm leaves would be pasted in front of different arts-adjacent or arts businesses in Keene to help people find those,” Lambert said.

The remaining students in Lambert’s spring community arts course worked with the professor to create a series of murals for a stairwell in Keene State’s Redfern Arts Center that they completed by the end of the semester.

Lambert welcomed those of all artistic backgrounds and experiences to the class, noting many students were not art majors and some had not taken art classes since middle school. The course began with students participating in the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center’s “Artful Ice Shanties” exhibit, which was displayed from Feb. 18-26 at Retreat Farm and celebrated New England’s history of ice fishing.

Several groups of students in Lambert’s class created shanty structures to assemble a small village, according to Carlson, whose group made two pieces of art.

“We were only supposed to make one but got ambitious,” Carlson said. “We made a rundown mobile home and then a broken down [recreational vehicle] to show there’s parts of cities and towns you don’t always see.”

The students’ collection of shanties took about three weeks to create and won the exhibition’s award for “best collaborative project,” Lambert said.

Lambert previously worked with another group of selected students on murals displayed at 48 Emerald St. for an advanced drawing class that concluded in December 2021. She said this spring’s murals replaced those from her previous class, some of which were collected by the artists and others now installed in the Redfern Arts Center.

Lambert said she hopes to continue the project next spring through another “Art in the Community” course with a new group of artists and potentially another business or building in Keene. She noted the murals are not permanent.

“These are just on sheets and the windows were already covered with plywood, so we’re just attaching onto that,” Lambert said. “If anyone has any plywood they’d like to work on, we would love that opportunity.”

Anyone interested in contacting Emily Lambert can do so at Emily.Lambert@keene.edu.