Hue It Forward, a subclub at Naperville Central High School, painted a new mural on the second floor to replace the old freedom shrine, displaying historical documents.
A freedom shrine is an arrangement of important historical documents that are recognized as the foundation to the United States.
“We are an organization outside of Naperville Central,” senior founder Riley Grace said. “However, in terms of the school, we are run under art club, but we are our own thing.”
This project was sponsored by Mike Bochenski, a social studies teacher at Central. According to him, he has been wanting to start the project for quite some time but hadn’t found the right group to execute the task until now.
“We had a [freedom] shrine here with all the documents and I have watched kids walk by it and absolutely ignore it for years,” Bochenski said. “It really bugged me as a government teacher and history teacher.”
Grace and Bochenski share the same opinion of doing this for the good of the students and think this mural will keep them in touch with the history that makes America what it is today.
“I always think reading and understanding primary sources in regards to the development and history of our Republic is super important,” Bochenski said.
With this new development came challenges for Hue It Forward. The painting was sketched out, and their original plan was to project the full image on the wall and trace it. When it proved impossible, about 75% of the painting had to be freehand. Grace voiced that it was only a minor setback, and they were able to work around these bumps in the road.
“The projector was not large enough, so what we ended up having to do was mathematically convert the pixels of the projector to the pixels of our image, so a couple of those days that we were working on the mural were actually math days,” Grace said.
In order to make that sketch, it had to be run by Bochenski due to this being sponsored by him, and he was the main contributor to getting Hue It Forward on this job.
“Because this project was sponsored, we wanted the final product to look how Borchenski wanted it to, so that was a very large process,” Grace said. “That meant sketching, resketching, adding and possibly starting from the very beginning of sketching again if they weren’t happy with the final product.”
In terms of organization, the layout of the documents put onto this new mural will be determined by the US History classes offered at Central. Bochenski wants this mural to involve the students as much as it can. This will hopefully make them feel like they were a part of the creation of this piece and make them more engaged with the importance of this freedom shrine.
“The Declaration of Independence and [Constitution are] going to be permanent, then I want five or six permanent spots above the capitol,” Bochenski said. “Then I want the US History kids to research, read and investigate each document. I want [those] students to pick the top 10-12 most important historical documents and I want to put a QR code underneath, so kids can scan it with their phone and read it.”
Grace was ecstatic to share the skills Hue It Forward has to offer and hopes in the future Central will support more projects done by them in order to enhance the learning experience of students.
“[Bochenski] took a chance and I can say on his behalf [that] he’s very happy with the final product,” Grace said. “I think what drew me towards this project was his confidence in us as students and recognizing that although we are high school students, we have skills and we want to leave a lasting impact at the school for which we care about.”