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A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Catelyn Calverly paints the three-dimensional bee portion of a mural artists and students created at Cloquet High School.
Visiting artists Moira Villiard, left, and Michelle Defoe work on the high school mural.
Custodians Chris Marciniak, Trevor Neff and Steve Martin install a round mural at Cloquet High School last week. The mural utilized three-dimensional cutouts of Ojibwe florals and pollinators, framing the northern lights on water.
Two artists in residency, Michelle Defoe and Moira Villiard, worked with Cloquet students to create two murals — one at Cloquet High School and one at Cloquet Middle School — over the past few months.
Cloquet High School art teacher Julie Deters was thrilled with the residency and the final high school mural — a round mural that utilized three-dimensional cutouts of Ojibwe florals and pollinators, framing the northern lights as they dance across blue waters.
The murals reflect the natural world and students are “leaving the school a better place through their artwork,” Villiard said. “The murals created will be enjoyed not just by the students who created them, but by students in the future as well.”
That notion follows Anishinaabe teachings about leaving the world a better place for seven generations in the future. “I think we modeled how to include multiple voices and perspectives into a project,” Villiard said.
Villiard talked about the process, saying she wanted to “ground students in the history of the land, and encourage exploring the unseen stories in our communities.”
Art teachers Andrea Cacek, Andrew Mettner and Julie Deters wrote grants through the Minnesota Department of Education to support the mural residency. Deters said they were very grateful to bring the experience to the students.
“I noticed the appreciation they had to be able to work alongside professional artists,” she said. “At the same time, they also got to hear their stories about their families, learning beadwork, plants used as medicine. That was just really beautiful.”
Students learned about Ojibwe florals, their history, and their use in contemporary times. They learned how to create patterns and simplify images from the natural world into patterns which were then used through the murals.
High schoolers who worked on the mural with the artists included Aspen Winbigler, Catelyn Calverly and Maija Terrio-Johnson.
On the middle school mural, each creature and plant was drawn by a student and then translated to the mural, which explores a theme of “voices of the river.”
“It’s a gift to do extra things like this for the school community,” Deters said.
