I’ve been attending a lot of meetings at School District 166 recently, in the room that is now called the Jane Mianowski Conference Room. The room, named after a much-loved math teacher and community member, was once part of the school cafeteria.
At some point, the large room was partitioned to create school administration office space. But as I’m sitting in the meeting room, I can almost hear the echoes of all of us kids, lined up along the window ledge slowly moving toward the serving window.
The memory of time spent in the noisy lunchroom is enhanced by the fact that the mural that was there long ago is still there. The mural—a brown-on-green sketch of Cook County life, including horse logging, fishing, and a tourist snapping a photo of it all—is the same.
As part of the Cook County Family YMCA planning, there is talk of once again opening up that large room, of removing the wall and again making the area a multipurpose room, for large meetings and parties—kind of like it was when I was a student. I am glad that there is talk of keeping the painted mural intact if possible. I think it’s important to have these artistic links to the past.
That is why I am an advocate for saving the beautiful fourseason mural on the exterior wall of the Cook County Whole Foods Co-op in downtown Grand Marais. I support “saving” the mural for several reasons. I agree that it is an amazing piece of public art enjoyed by visitors. I frequently see tourists pausing by the co-op wall to have their picture taken by this lovely symbol of the North Shore. Guests in our community recognize the treasure we have in our midst.
I also believe there is some responsibility to preserve the mural because of the financial contributions from numerous sources for its creation. I remember doing several articles over the four years the mural was being designed and installed about grants received for work and materials. Those charitable organizations should have something lasting to show for their donations. They should still be able to come to Grand Marais to see the glittering four-season scene they envisioned when they supported the project.
But most of all, I want the mural to stand for the students who worked so hard to create it, from sketches in a notebook to sketches on poster board; from selecting colors to marking tiles to be cut; from arranging tiles to gluing tiles. Students wrote grants and press releases and invitations to dedication ceremonies. They worked really hard on something that they thought they would be able to come home from college to visit, on something they could show their kids someday and about which they could say, “I helped make that.”
There are many, many worthy causes in Cook County. Every week there is an event to raise money for something. So I know it’s hard to come up with another donation. But I hope that many of us try. Because if we manage to raise enough money to preserve the colorful mural on the co-op wall, we can all say, “I helped make that.”
The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them.
John Berger
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