Carefully crafted stencils including Maya Angelou, Kendrick Lamar, and many other influential African Americans were intricately constructed by Public Art Collaborative (PAC) in collabora
tion with the Black Student Union (BSU). The stencils will help South students visually learn about important black figures for Black History Month and will be displayed in the hallways around South, Scott Glass, English Teacher and PAC Sponsor, said.
PAC creates public art pieces that are displayed around the halls of South and within the Glenview community, Glass said. The club votes on each project before splitting up into smaller groups of students to help work on the piece in parts, junior Brendan Gomez, PAC member, said.
“We come together as a group [to] design, draw, stencil, and color everything,” Gomez said. “We all have an equal say [because we] don’t want anyone else to be excluded, so everyone [contributes].”
Pairing with BSU and PAC, senior Mia Hermann’s, BSU member, idea to spread awareness of important black figures was turned into the carefully crafted stencils, Glass said. Hermann came up with the idea for the project after hearing a civil rights lecture in her Advanced Placement United States History class last year, leading her to collaborate with BSU and PAC to help visualize her idea.
“[There is going to be a] different person for each locker,” Hermann explained. “ [For example], there will be a locker dedicated to Pharrell Williams with the stencil of [him] and then it will have little bits of information [about Williams] and colorful accents that are red, yellow, and green.”
PAC’s past projects include designing the logo for Clash of Cans, South’s food drive, and Pixelation, a piece constructed out of sticky notes in front of the South library, junior Ben Glass,
PAC member, stated. “We interviewed a bunch of people [for Pixelation] about a tiny thing that
brings them a lot of joy and put [the answers] on a bunch of sticky notes,” Ben said.
PAC also has a place for everyone even if they aren’t artistically inclined, Scott said. Art dates back thousands of years to ancestors with much harder lives, so anyone who wants to learn and partake can with PAC, Scott added.
“If our early ancestors are doing [art] in the midst of [their] difficult and short lived [lives], art is something [needed and valuable] to our species,” Scott said.