Moorestown High School AP Arts Students 'Destroy' The World's Problems

MOORESTOWN, NJ — For a group of 46 juniors and seniors in Julia Mooney’s Moorestown High School AP Art classes, the final test is not the end of the learning experience. For eight years, Mooney has been inviting (ok, requiring) her students to “do” some of the post-modernism they spent the final unit learning about.

“It goes without saying that this has been a politically charged year - difficult for many of us to navigate as teachers, let alone as daughters, mothers, and friends,” Mooney said. “As an usher for the latest generation of voters, I knew this was something we needed to face rather than avoid. We had just finished learning about Ai Wei Wei’s 'Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn' (1995) and discussing the trend of destruction in post-modernism. Destruction is cathartic. Maybe it was really me who needed the catharsis, but for better or worse I am a better, more passionate educator when it's personal.”

She asked her students to make a visual representation of one of the issues they wanted to see eradicated, to contribute to a larger collaborative artwork.

In pitching her idea to her students, she told them “your voice matters. Sometimes it feels like your voices are smothered by parents, politics, and administrators, but let's use art to be heard. Specifically this will be the voice of your generation.”

She asked them what they wanted to see disappear as they enter adulthood, warming them up with the trivial.

“Cell phone restrictions? Yes, but then came standardized tests,” Mooney said. “Test-culture in general. Gender stereotypes. College debt. Poverty. Addiction. Terrorism. Cancer. Racism. Sexism. Gun violence. They brought up heavy topics without hesitation and I was already proud of them.”

There were a variety of reactions and ideas.

“One student made a piece suggesting we eradicate the Black Lives Matter movement. I asked him to re-do it, since that represented one political viewpoint,” Mooney said. “He lamented that he felt his voice was always squelched by liberals and I reminded him that this wasn’t the format to assert one party’s voice - rather a place to unify with peers by identifying broad common grievances. He seemed to see the logic in this and made a new piece from scratch.”

Mooney later said part of her regretted watering down their fiery voices. She said some of the issues needed to be generalized in order to remain “politically neutral.” She recognizes that even then, some may argue they chose sides. In the end, she called it a lesson in deliberate, respectful discourse.

“If my students learned something about that by way of art, I did my job this year,” Mooney said.

In the next stage of the project, the student body was invited to help them “destroy” the issues they’d come up with by throwing paint-filled water balloons at their artwork. The elementary school donated Crayola washable paint, and students worked together to draft an artist statement.

One boy designed “suggestion cards,” which were given to each balloon-thrower in order to garner ideas and solutions for the future. The art students would later make a second half of the project representing those solutions on a “horizon.”

“On the day of the 'destruction,' the scene was alive with curiosity and delight as passersby happily chucked balloons at our artwork (glued on a 4’x2’ masonite board),” Mooney said. “A few teachers jumped in and a few balloons hit the exterior school wall (much to my administrators’ dismay). The entire piece of art was smothered. In the end, balloon bits were stuck to it, pieces of paper were peeling off, and just enough of the 'destroyed' imagery could be seen through a sea of cool-colored paint splatters.”

“This project created an open dialogue for people to discuss the injustices they see in the world today,” Moorestown High School junior Jaxon Zaorski said. “The symbolic destruction served as an release for us, the artists.”

Senior Marc Mounzer called the project “a simple and fun way to artistically shed light on issues that are relevant in today’s society.”

The next day, Mooney chose a few volunteers to paint a sunrise on a horizon for the second half of the piece, while the students read through the suggestion cards.

“Most suggestions were serious and students took turns writing out the solutions (consolidated into carefully worded positive phrases),” Mooney said. “We constructed the two halves into a diptych, throwing in a lesson on how to use a drill, and had it hung in the hall. Art History 2017 had left their mark.

“Social critiques. The democratization of art. Unconventional methods. These are some of the characteristics of postmodern art we had identified in our final unit of study. This project allowed us to be postmodern artists and experience first hand how art is so much more than a final product.”

Attached image provided by Moorestown High School AP Art Teacher Julia Mooney

Attached image provided by Moorestown High School AP Arts Teacher Julia Mooney