As incoming freshmen entered the halls of East Peoria Community High School last week, they were welcomed by a new program aimed at easing the transition into high school, and a mural to represent it all.
“I think it brightens up the hallway and makes it kind of unique for them,” said EPCHS art teacher Kristen Berry of the mural that she said is about 200 feet long.
Freshmen Academy coordinator Karen Beverlin asked Berry, 25, to paint the mural as a way to welcome incoming freshmen to the school and to highlight the new program, which she described as a “school within a school.”
The mural, painted with latex acrylic house paint, spans the length of an entire hallway on the school’s third floor. The hallway has been dedicated to the freshmen class and houses classrooms of the teachers of freshman-level core classes such as English, math, health and science.
Before taking on this project, Berry said the largest mural she had painted was 4 feet by 9 feet.
She began the project in mid-June and finished Aug. 6, spending about 80 hours of her summer vacation painting at the school.
“Some days it would only be like a couple of hours, depending on how much needed to be done,” she said. “For the most part it was about 10 to 12 hours a day.”
Berry, who has a degree in art education from Northern Illinois University, had some help from her mother Kim Hansen, step-dad Andy Hansen, and friends Lindsey Ford, Jonathan Davison and Manirah Agans.
“My mom did the clouds for me,” Berry said. “She’s done a lot of house painting, but she also understands what I was wanting, so I trusted her with some of the detailed stuff, which helped me so much.”
The freshmen class was divided into tribes. Beverlin asked that the mural incorporate those tribes, which are earth, water, wind and fire.
“I had free range on how I translated that, which was kind of nice because then you’re not so restricted,” Berry said.
Each tribe is represented in the mural. The mural begins with an owl, perched on a root of the tree of life, then transitions into rolling waves, which Berry designated as the most time-consuming part of the project. Clouds and Berry’s favorite portion of the mural, Aelous, the Greek God of wind, follow the waves.
“I just love painting people, so I had the most fun with him,” she said.
The mural is completed by a vibrant, fiery Phoenix.
“My hope is that it brings more of a unity to the freshmen,” she said. “They’re like, ‘Oh hey, that’s my tribe. It’s represented right there.’ It’s such a unique thing for a school to have any kind of mural, but then to have one specifically for your class, for this new program, for your tribe. I would have a lot of pride in that.”
