If you paid attention to the walls at Blake you would see some really interesting pieces of art as you are walking around. There are projects everywhere! The art wing always has the latest student designs, the library features a mural, and even the history wing is involved!
One project that was done a few years ago was The Bird Project, a team-up between Brian Sago’s printmaking class and [teacher, trying to figure out]’s environmental science class. Sago still vividly remembers the project: “We called it the Migratory Bird Project. We were studying birds that flew through Minnesota on their route through the air and the summer…the idea was that the science students were researching the habitat threat [to the bird] and then it’s migratory season. If you look at the map, it’s a map of the United States and South America, and then it’s cross-hatched with a color for where their winter nesting grounds are. The visual art students were carving large blocks of plywood to make the prints. Mr. Sackreiter made the prints for us, we kind of had a third-party community member team up. A mix of Dremel tools which spin to cut… Then we inked them up and printed them on Mulberry paper, also known as Kozo. We printed them by hand on that and then had an exhibit at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.” Sago also hopes to bring back some form of this project in the future. He doesn’t know how it would look, but “I’m not against [bringing it back] since it would be a new generation of students… there’s sort of the question of if we did it again would we do a different kind of bird.”
Several students shared their thoughts on the murals. Davandre Campbell ‘25 said “I don’t really know much about them but I see them every day. I don’t really have any connection to them since I don’t understand them. I just [see] them as pieces of art scattered across the school,” while Zac Gartner ‘25 has a different perspective: “I think they’re pretty cool, I think it’s a cool way to show school spirit.” Gartner explained that there is a difference between looking at the murals before being a Blake student versus after becoming one, having felt “A little bit [of a connection].”
Noticed or unnoticed, Blake students have a connection to the art projects done around the school!
