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Published on 01/11/1999 All articles from this issue

Students celebrate opening of Museum

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By Linda Taaffe / Town Crier Staff Writer

Students throughout the Los Altos School District will help launch the reopening of the Stanford Art Museum next month with class murals.

Classes from Bullis-Purissima and Almond schools participated in making eight of the 40 school murals from Santa Clara and San Mateo counties that will be displayed at the museum and at Stanford Shopping Center Jan. 24 in honor of the renovated museum. The museum has been closed since 1989 due to damage from the Loma Prieta Earthquake.

"I think this is such a unique opportunity for the kids to be able to see their work displayed in public," said Dionys Briggs, a second-grade teacher at Almond School. "The kids are very excited. They just dove right in."

Museum officials said they organized the mural festival to help introduce students to the museum's resources. Students were asked to create a mural on the theme "Imagining a Museum."

A spokeswoman said the largest number of participants came from the Los Altos School District.

Kim Chansler, a volunteer art teacher at Bullis, said she believes the Los Altos community holds a high regard for the arts.

"A lot of kids in this area are familiar with all different kinds of museums - technical, natural history, art," she said.

Chansler said students in kindergarten and second grade spent about four weeks creating murals of "things to put in a museum." She said the students often volunteered their recess time to work on the murals.

"I think they learned a lot," she said. "They had to practice drawing buildings and think about how what goes in the inside of a museum determines how the outside of the building will look."

The seven Almond classes from grades 2, 3, and 5 participating in the mural festival integrated their projects with other course work.

Third-graders made a mural depicting a natural history museum, which tied into the students' study of habitats, said teacher Mary Ellen Lynch.

Third grader Emi Yoshihara said she drew the habitats and animals from her memory of things she had studied in books and had seen on field trips. She drew the iguana "from the one I had at my Japanese school," she said.

Briggs said her second-grade class made a mural of quilts as part of their geometry studies. She said the mural provided her students the opportunity to draw boxes and make geometric designs. Briggs said she hopes to take the class to the museum.

The museum was renamed the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University last September after the philanthropists who donated more than $10 million to rebuilding project. The museum cost $42 million to renovate and reopen.

It will include a renovated historic museum, a new, 42,000-square-foot wing and an outdoor garden area.

The new museum will feature ancient to modern works.

The location of specific school murals had not been determined at the time the Town Crier went to press.

For more information about the museum or murals, call 723-3469.