In February 2025, Kelsey Wengel’s Advanced Art students collaborated to create tape art murals on DVHS walls, hoping to brighten the halls.
There were originally six murals in all. The murals in the 1000s building depict a student throwing their graduation cap in the air and a pair of hands holding a brain and a heart, the latter of which is in progress at the time of writing. The 2000s building features a pair of wings and a wildcat dipping its paw in the water. The walls of the 3000s and 4000s buildings have a group of paper airplanes and a Chinese dragon, respectively. The mural of the graduating student has been taken down due to being tampered with.
“The project started as a public art mural kind of idea,” Wengel said. “But we can’t put anything permanent on the walls here. So to accommodate that, we had to think about ways to do things temporarily, and the tape was our temporary way to install something. That’s sort of the genesis of the idea.”
Additionally, Wengel noted that she tries to do a similar project every year or every other year in order to highlight her students’ artwork.
“Displaying your work publicly takes bravery and courage, to make something that you know is going to be viewable, and not just for you or your college portfolio,” she said.
Advanced Art focuses on painting, drawing and print-making, with an important aspect being getting artwork ready for college portfolios. Fun projects like these, Wengel said, are ways to get students out of the classroom for a bit.
“We had just come out of something really heavy and technical with painting and blending and color theory, and I felt like they needed a break,” she explained. “And it’s also something they could do as a small group, so they were either in couples, groups of three, or groups of four or so. It got them out and having a little bit of a social break to be with each other.”
Before getting out and about to work on the murals, however, there was a brainstorming phase in which the class discussed their hopes for the project, chose the designs they’d be creating and planned where they would showcase their work.
“Kind of the whole point of making an installation piece is that you’re thinking about what your viewers might be uplifted by or might make them think about. There have been years where it was all social commentary pieces, other years where we kept it all very positive vibes,” Wengel said. “It just depends on what’s going on that year. So that’s the beauty of making something for the public, not just for you. We were thinking about what our students would want to pass by every day.”
Wengel’s students pitched various ideas to the class, and the final designs were chosen after some discussion. Then, each group had to think about how they would create their designs using tape.
“The nature of the media being something straight, that was also visually a challenge for people to be like, what if I want to make something that’s curvy?” Wengel mentioned. “So they had to then use the straight tape and layer it and then X-ACTO it out or cut it out to create something that’s organic and something that’s geometric like the material’s calling for.”
As a medium for the students’ art, tape has several qualities that make it a convenient choice for an art mural, but it’s not ideal.
“The tape allows us to work quite quickly,” Wengel said. “It’s clean, so we’re not dripping anything, and we can pre-plan in the classroom quite a bit before we go out and put it up. And it’s cheap, too; it’s really inexpensive. But it’s just not permanent enough, so things do start to unravel and fall apart, and kids can pick at it and remove it, and so in that regard it’s not ideal.”
Amongst the final designs, some serve unique purposes.
“So the wings, you can stand between them, so the wings will be looking like they’re attached to you,” Wengel said, referring to the pair of wings in the 2000s building. “So that one has kind of a different intent than some of the other ones that are more meant to be viewed as you’re walking by.”
The two murals in the 1000s building, on the other hand, are meant to represent specific ideas related to the seniors, the grade level the building is associated with.
“That one’s [the hands holding the heart and the brain] about weighing following your heart versus following your logic. So that one’s quite thought-provoking—and they chose to put that in the senior building, and it’s kind of right around decision-making time. So that one is quite poignant,” Wengel highlighted. “The cap being thrown into the air is to celebrate the seniors graduating.”
Other murals, like the dreaming wildcat dipping its paw into the water, with the moon on one side and the sun on the other, are meant to “encourage students to daydream and use their imagination and get outside, break the confines of the building,” Wengel said.
Overall, Wengel and her students hope that the murals will brighten up the school and highlight the artists of the school.
“All of [the murals] are meant to be visually appealing, visually uplifting, visually engaging, and if we can do that, I think then we’ve been successful, because it’s covering the white wall, and it’s adding some color and adding some interest,” Wengel said. “Art being visible and celebrating the creative people at our school and creative thinking is really important to me, and I do always wish and have tried to make the school more colorful and exciting.”
Amulya Chintalapati, a sophomore who worked on the paper airplane mural, noted that Wengel provided a lot of support to the various groups along the way.
“We were thinking, ‘Let’s go small.’ And then she was like, ‘No, you guys should make it as big as someone could sit on,’” she said. “The group in the 2k with the wildcat and the flowers, they had a lot of difficulties in terms of getting it done; it was really just a complicated design, so they needed more support. She just kind of joined them and helped them.”
She described the process as rewarding and appreciated the chance to explore new mediums, while also remembering the behind-the-scenes challenges.
“You’re sitting there and you’re standing on a stool and I had to be on my tiptoes because I’m not too tall, and then your calf would start cramping, and then your hands start cramping, so it was just a little uncomfortable,” Chintalapati recalled. “We were going to write stuff on the planes—like our teacher brought up, ‘What if you wrote a love note on it?’—but it ended up being a lot more time-consuming than we thought and we weren’t able to do that.”
Currently, the district will not allow any paint to be applied directly to the wall for student murals, one of the reasons behind using alternate materials like tape. Wengel expresses her hopes that one day, this will change, pointing out the issues that come with murals made with less permanent materials.
“We have issues with this piece in the 4000s building [the dragon mural], somebody keeps ripping chunks of it off. So, you know, that’s discouraging, especially for the artists who made it and worked really hard on it, to walk by and see that pieces of it are gone. That’s not the kind of engagement that we’re looking for,” Wengel said. “So that’s why painting on the wall would be ideal, because it wouldn’t be something that could be tampered with.”
She commented on other ideas she would like to see come to fruition, but have so far been blocked.
“I envision walking into the 4k and the whole lobby just being overtaken with beautiful color and walking into a jungle space or something. Just something that you could keep building off of every year, too; it can just keep compounding,” she said.
Wengel also mentioned a pitch she made when the first senior class graduated that was denied.
“You know our pillars in the hallways? I thought it would be so cool if each senior class was able to create a mosaic or paint a pillar and dedicate it to their class,” she explained.
Despite not being able to carry through with all of her plans, Wengel does everything she can to add vividity to the lives of DVHS students.
“When I walk around in my own room, I see a lot of color here and vibrancy and joy. And when I leave my own spaces, I see just bland gray and white and black and blue and brown and it’s kind of not stimulating for me in the right way,” Wengel said. “I try to put myself in the mind of the student and what I know I need to feel some joy, that’s to have color.”
