Creating a Solidarity Banner - What I learned

I've always loved the idea of sidewalk chalk art. In addition to being just a fun form of artistic expression, it's become an innovative way for public relations experts to draw attention to a particular cause or issue. The good and bad news is that it's just temporary - washed away with the first rain.

After the horrific scenes of the Paris terrorist attacks, artists emerged to draw their feelings on the sidewalk and regular people joined in. It got me thinking - what could we do in little ol' Olney to show our solidarity? Our own sidewalk chalk art!

I reached out to the Carl Freeman company to see if they would let us draw around their fountain as part of their Winterfest activities on December 5. They went one better. "How about your own banner and we'll supply the markers, and, we'll hang it up when it's done in our usual spot at the corner of Spartan Road and Rte 108." Um, okay. That was more ambitious than I planned but what the heck?

So on Winterfest day, the Freeman folks laid out the banner with several large colored markers and had one of their photographer/artists outline the banner title - Solidarity Banner for Peaceful Living. Perfect!!

Now I just had to wait for people to come. I hadn't really thought about how this would all work. The Freeman folks did ask me to monitor the banner but I wasn't sure what that meant. It turned out that to get the impact I was looking for, I needed to monitor it quite a bit. Thanks to some friends who showed up, (Shout out to angels - Meryl T., Fern M. and Stephanie B.!), we facilitated the participation of young and old alike. We asked them to think about what they wanted to draw or write before they put marker to banner. This was a Solidarity Banner for Peaceful Living after all so we wanted their contributions to help illustrate how we in Olney felt about our fellow humans in Paris.

The other thing I learned was that even though it was great to have the contribution of little humans, they tended to draw squiggly lines or half completed faces so we asked that their parent or guardian work with them to improve the quality of their artistic expression. What emerged was a teachable moment between adult and child about why they were doing this and what did they really want to say to others. For me, that was priceless.

Side note:

We were fortunate to have a local muralist drop by who drew beautiful images that really raised the bar of our artwork. She is pictured above in the red hat but I didn't get her name so if anyone recognizes her, would you please send me her name so we can thank her properly and promote her work!