Catholic New World photo/David V. Kamba

By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

For Arielle Torres, a seventh-grader at Alphonsus Academy and Center for the Arts, it was all about taking paint to canvas.

For Sam Johnson, a graphic design student at DePaul University, it was about finding a way to incorporate the visions of dozens of students into a single work of art, and for DePaul art education major Jennifer Lee, it was about planning and finishing a project in which the students could take pride.

The project—a mural on the ground floor of the school—came together, showing two students, a statue of St. Alphonsus and St. Alphonsus Church, and, on a ribbon woven through the painting, symbols of the arts and sciences that children study.

Alphonsus Academy art teacher Meltem Aktas and DePaul art professor Brother Mark Elder couldn’t be more pleased with the collaboration.

“I wanted to emphasize the values of a Catholic education,” said Aktas, a Chicago-based iconographer, “and I thought we should take advantage of the resources our Catholic universities can provide.”

That’s music to the ears of Elder, the Vincentian brother who created “The Mandatum,” the shadow-mural of Jesus washing the feet of the apostles on the wall of the Catholic Charities’ building along the Kennedy Expressway at Randolph Street. Elder wants his students to learn not only the techniques they will need, but also how to work with a client and incorporate the owner’s vision into a commissioned piece.

Seeing the complete mural for the first time June 3, Elder said he was especially impressed by the vibrancy of color and the way the elements spoke to the components of a Catholic education.

The project included input from Alphonsus Academy students, who were given disposable cameras and asked to photograph images they thought expressed the mission of their school. Johnson, Lee and Aktas went through the photos and chose what to include. Armed with that input. Johnson designed and drew the mural. While he and Lee did much of the painting, older students were assigned small sections to work on.

“For them, it was kind of painting by numbers,” Johnson said.

But Torres said she learned quite a bit about creating shadows and layering paints to get the effect she wanted.

“Any time I take paint to canvas, I find a new way of expressing myself,” she said.

St. Alphonsus pastor Father Jim Hurlbert said the mural represents the school’s focus on the arts, a niche it has tried to carve for itself to take advantage of all of the arts in its neighborhood. The parish itself owns the Athenaeum Theater building, and the third floor of the school is leased as rehearsal space to various arts groups.

“We wanted our children to be able to take advantage of that,” he said.

Elder would like to do similar projects with other Catholic schools, he said. There are barriers, including the cost of materials, but he thinks most schools would benefit, as would DePaul students.

“At least they could invite us in and we could talk about what they’d like to do,” he said. “I’d like to do the whole diocese.”

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