Keene State’s Art and Community class had murals installed at Brewbakers and Horse & Buggy Feeds in Keene on Thursday, May 1.
Professor Emily Lambert said this is her fourth year running the class, and she tries to partner with local organizations. The class started the semester with a project at the Brattleboro Museum before moving to the mural project.
Lambert said the students created proposals, which were then looked at by the two businesses.
“Both businesses spoke with the students and gave very open parameters for the students because they really wanted to see the students’ artwork and see their ideas shine,” Lambert said.
Lambert said her favorite part of the process is watching students’ ideas grow into the final versions of the project.
“Watching ideas come from small conversations and drawings to being completed and worked on within the classroom, and then seeing the transformation again as they are attached to the exterior of the buildings, I think it’s exciting to see,” she said.
Lambert also spoke to the process of creating the artwork.
“The entire process, it’s just really rewarding,” she added. “To see the student’s sense of pride and dedication to the work, because these murals happen while we’re in class time, but they also require many hours outside of class time for them to make these paintings happen.”
Lambert said for next year’s class, she wants to expand her horizons for the project.
“Next year, we’re going to do one partnership in Keene, but I’m also looking forward to bringing some of their painted murals to campus and finding locations on campus for murals,” she said.
Senior Kyla Culver said she was inspired by her own passion for textile work, along with a Norwegian artist who works in painted textiles for her mural.
“I picked eight symbols that I thought represented Brewbaker’s and I turned each of those into a quilt square of a single color,” Culver said. “And I looked at complementary colors and laid them out in a way that I thought made the most sense.”
Culver said the hardest part of the project for her was the scale.
“I’ve done pretty big paintings before, but nothing this big,” she said. “Just using the mural paint and trying to get really flat colors on a really giant 8×4 canvas was the hardest part.”
Culver, an English major, said that she enjoyed working on the details of the project.
“I really am a very detail-oriented person, so I loved doing all the intricate little patterns,” she said.
Culver said the project helped her learn how to collaborate.
“I’m a little bit of a control freak, I like to just have my routine and my way of doing things,” she said. “And it [the project] forces you to let other people into your process.”
According to Lambert, the murals will be on display until spring 2026.
Emily Sloane can be contacted at
esloane@kscequinox.com
This article’s photo caption was updated on May 9 to correct a mislabeling of junior Ky Wolosky’s name. The Equinox apologizes for this error.
