Quartet's Exhibition: Skeidelberg, Diaspora, Gardens & Alice

Matthew and Lee wrote a few notes on our first-ever quartet Exhibition.

For the last Exhibitions of the year, Karl had the 8th graders present their Legacy Projects, which are projects that they leave behind at Summers-Knoll, a new system or object to improve the school in some way. The 7th graders did “retro exhibitions,” where they chose a topic they had done before and revisited it with a new Project and Exhibition. 

We went to the Exhibition of Elizabeth's, Maya’s, Trent’s, and Jianmarco’s Legacies.

Elizabeth's Legacy Project was a mural in the upstairs space about diaspora. For our first Exhibitions of the year, Elizabeth started this mural for the Utopia/Dystopia/Diaspora theme, and now it’s her last Exhibition of the year as she finishes her massive mural. She painted the mural on the high wall that adjoins our classroom's ceiling. It was a painting of people of all different nationalities, represented by pictures of people wearing clothing made from their countries' flags. She also painted the bottoms of some shoes and put 70 footprints on the wall.  

Maya’s Legacy Project was using multitrack recording equipment to make an album of the music that we made for Alice in Wonderland, our school play this year. She and Elizabeth wrote most of the songs themselves. Maya showed us some of the music, and the process that she went through to record it all. Then, Maya made us sing “You are my Sunshine,” and record it.  

Trent’s Legacy Project was helping Chris out with gardening.  He walked us around the gardens, and told us about his and Chris’s plans for the future. There were three locations for Trent's work: the butterfly garden that he and Isobel planned on the west side of the school; Chris' garden by the southeast corner of the property; and a mobile raised bed.

Jianmarco’s Legacy Project was a fort that he made on the north end of the wooded playground, based on the Heidelberg Project in Detroit--hence the name 'Skeidelberg House'.  He wanted a treehouse, but there were too many regulations.  He told us his design process under Spencer and then Evan's tutelage, and showed us his blueprints. Then, we christened the structure by climbing on it. It will be painted this summer.