Process

Throughout this process, we were inspired by our peers within Arts and outside of Arts. We got to learn about how other students were approaching their capstone projects and focus on the differences in order to hone in on the similarities. We learned that students do individual projects, work through internships, participate in service learning, and so much more in order to complete their capstones. Since there are so many unique programs, it was important to us to learn about them so that they creatively represented. We learned a lot about professional communication in the process of creating our capstone project. We were in constant communication with our program director, the other program directors, the Scholars Central Team, those in the Director's Office of Facilities Management, and the Scholars Advisory Board. We learned about being flexible, as we had to rethink our initial designs in order to come up with our final product. We learned how to ask effective questions in order to make the most progress as well. Both members of this group, Jenna and Jackie, are also members of the Peer Mentors program through College Park Scholars to help guide freshman scholars through their first year. Because the Peer Mentors Program has been such an important part of our time in Scholars, we wanted to incorporate a piece of it into our project by incorporating the teal color that is on the Peer Mentor shirts this school year as the background. To contrast this bright background, we went with the decision to use a grayscale (black, gray/silver, and white) for the symbols so they would stand out and be cohesive with one another. We thought of this project idea in a unique political/social climate that had arisen in the unprecedented year of 2020. Through the use of our sources, we have gained ideas that are crucial within the context of this project. With the country as divided as ever in this unusual time, we thought it would be beneficial to center our project around unity, and what better group of people to unite than the College Park Scholars at the University of Maryland? We thought of many different ways of trying to incorporate unity into our project, but ultimately landed on the idea of a mural as a visual representation of what unites us, as was demonstrated in several sources that we used. People paint murals for many different reasons, but according to Jane Golden, “without a mural, we wouldn’t be a community,” (Golden, 2002). The first source this idea arose from was from details in an interview with the assistant principal of a Baltimore County high school that collaborated with a local business in a beautification project (E. Flam, personal communication, September 28, 2020). The goal of this project was to accurately represent the community of Owings Mills, Maryland through symbols that bring residents together, such as the mill in the center of town as well as local teams and other symbols. Taking inspiration from this, we also wanted to create a visual reminder of all that the Scholars community at the University of Maryland has in common through symbols and colors, rather than focusing on what divides us. Similarly, a source called “Preserving the Memory of What Just Happened” from late September of this year inspired our decision to use the method of mural painting as a uniting factor and preservation method (Martin, 2020). This article focused on the brutal police killing of the black American, George Floyd and the protests and unrest that followed. Members of this community wanted to memorialize these events and make a visual reminder of the times and what they have been fighting for. Similarly, we wanted to create our mural as a visual reminder that the differences among us must be celebrated, rather than villainized and that although we are all in different programs with different interests, we are all one community. While this article talks about artists trying to reflect America’s popular culture, we are trying to reflect the Scholar’s popular culture, as the murals responded to “both aesthetic and socio-political stimuli,” (Marling, 1982). We learned a lot about the history of mural making and the importance of them. Memorializing certain events is just one reason why murals are important and we wanted to do the same with how we see the Scholars programs. Much of the literature we read in relation to this project had to do with not only the history of mural making, but also the history of the Scholars program so that we were able to accurately depict it through our designs. We were able to talk to a variety of different people in order to gain knowledge about murals and the Scholars programs. We learned about the collaboration between a Baltimore County high school and a local business to create something beautiful. We also learned about how to preserve Scholars legacy by using symbols. We were also able to have interviews and discussions with members of College Park Scholars faculty to gain their input and see our project from the perspective of others involved in the program that are not students. A main technique we used during the drafting of our project was "Killing your Darlings." This means that as we went along, we adapted our designs to new feedback and made changes to the design of our project. One major example of this was changing the what previously served as a "C" in the word "Scholars" from the symbol of a magnifying glass to a crescent moon in response to feedback that this symbol didn't resemble a "C" as closely as we had originally thought.