Art students at Creighton Community School are using their creative wiles to communicate social messages to their school and community through a project called Guerrilla Art.
The term guerrilla art refers to street art that is intended to generate a response from the public.
“It’s supposed to be shocking and anonymous,” says art teacher Catherine Joa.
In Joa’s Grade 9 art classroom, guerrilla art provides a forum for students to raise awareness about a social issue, a requirement in the curriculum.
It’s also a way for students to explore ways to impact their community and use their voices as artists.
On Wednesday, Joa’s students set up their guerrilla art installations throughout the school, and a few outside the school as well.
The pieces were as varied as the students who created them, with art intended to generate a smile, such as a lineup of cheeky grins attached to lamp posts along Creighton’s main street; a life-sized Jack in the Beanstalk climbing a pole near the baseball field; and a series of motivational quotes lining the front of each step on one of the school’s main stairways.
Joa says one group set up an interactive art installation: a table where students could guess the number of Skittles in a jar, with one caveat – they needed to give a genuine compliment to another person and write down the compliment with their guess, in order to win the prize.
Other students created pieces intended to get passersby thinking, like a bleak garbage dump scene set up near one of the school’s main thoroughfares, a vivid reminder that the garbage that disappears from our homes is not really gone.
