A monster-laden banner, designed by Village School students and prominent artist Stefan Bucher, has been sent to a school in Mali, West Africa, as part of the Global Art Project for Peace. In exchange, art created by 300 Mali students in the school, run by Peace Corps volunteer Dina Carlin, will be exhibited at Village School this fall. ‘Peace is a big scary monster,’ says Village School art teacher Margot Mandel, explaining how monsters fit into the global theme of peace. ‘If we could view monsters as peaceful, cuddly creatures, rather than as the boogey man, it would be the start of sending our view that peace is possible, that we can tame the monster that people never thought could be tamed.’ Mandel, who received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Carnegie Mellon and her master’s in education from UCLA, said the idea for the banner came about in jigsaw fashion. Third grader Harris Culhane visited the Hammer Museum with his parents and saw an exhibition by Bucher, an illustrator, graphic designer and writer who is famous for his online illustrations and storytelling experiments with monsters. The family obtained the artist’s information and gave it to Mandel, who contacted Bucher. She told him about the Pacific Palisades K-6 school and its theme ‘Going Global’ and asked if he would consider being part of a project submitted to the Global Art Project, based in Tucson, Arizona. ‘He was totally on board from the beginning,’ Mandel says. Bucher designed his monster during a school assembly on March 15. He dropped blobs of India ink on a canvas and then gave the ink a spritz of canned air, which blew the ink in different directions. He rotated the paper around, looking at different angles, until he began to see a monster emerge. Using Sharpies, he extended the ink, then drew a monster. As he drew, his art was projected on an overhead screen and students were encouraged to ask questions. Bucher, a native of Germany, moved to California in 1994 at the age of 20 to attend Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Explaining that he stayed because he felt he had more opportunities in the United States, Bucher worked briefly at a Portland advertising firm before opening 344 Design in Los Angeles. After passing a citizenship and language test, he is now officially a resident. Nationally recognized, he is the author and designer of ‘The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers from around the Globe,’ ‘All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers’ and ‘100 Days of Monsters.’ One Village School student asked Bucher why he started drawing monsters. ‘It came to me when I was driving,’ he said. ‘There was a shadow on my arm and it looked like an unbelievable creature, like a friendly monster.’ After Bucher completed his monster, Mandel had the image blown up and placed on a four-foot by eight-foot banner. The next step involved 293 students making their own monsters, using Bucher’s process. Mandel, who has taught at Village School for the past 16 years, knew that having students create their own monsters would be the easiest part of the project for her. When students enter her art classroom, the first sign they see is ‘There are no mistakes, only happy accidents.’ After the students finished, the most difficult part of completing the artwork was to cut out each monster and find the best place to glue it on the banner that contained Bucher’s monster. ‘We had a puzzle party,’ says Mandel, who with the help of parents Kate Mcgowan Pearce and Ora Nadrich spent hours cutting and gluing. ‘It became a puzzle, working to fit each monster in.’ Once completed, Mandel took the banner to a store to have the piece photographed. The large banner with all of the individually glued pieces (which kept falling off) made the piece seem fragile, which seemed to Mandel like another way of speaking about the global peace issue. At the store, the banner was photographed, then the shadows and lines were Photoshopped out. Mandel sent a photo of the final project to Bucher, who responded: ‘Wow, this is crazy cool. I love the texture of the little monsters on the face. It’s like porcelain. I’m putting it on the blog right away.’ On his Web site www.dailymonster.com, Bucher wrote: ‘Hey, remember when I told you about drawing monsters at the Village School in Pacific Palisades a few weeks ago? Well, teacher Margot Mandel and her students took one of those monsters, made it into a big honking banner’which they’re submitting to Katherine Josten’s Global Art Project at the Tucson Art Center where they know me’and added monsters of their own to it. How many monsters? Conservative estimates put it in the bazillion range.’And what an amazing job they did of it, too!’ On April 15 at Village School, the banner was presented to Josten, who started her project in 1994 to create a culture of peace through art. Participants are asked to make a work of art that expresses a vision of global peace and goodwill. An international exchange is organized by matching participants, group-to-group and individual-to-individual. The exchange occurs the last week of April biennially. Village fourth grader Kate Reilly asked Josten, an award-winning artist whose paintings are included in museum collections and who taught art for 14 years at the college level, ‘When you started this organization, did you have any second thoughts?’ ‘I never lost sight of the dream,’ Josten said. ‘But every day I have second thoughts.’ Mandel said that in addition to sharing the students’ art, ‘we’re hoping to continue relations with the Mali school,’ which is sending its art from Africa via its Peace Corp leader. According to parent Mcgowan Pearce ‘She is coming to New York in June, and will send us their piece from there.’
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