Ramiro Davaro-Comas

Program Description

Our school and community based mural projects centers students and community drawings/paintings in our process. We host a variety of brain storming and idea generating workshops with students and community members to come up with themes, color combinations, and overall look of the mural. The main tool we use is drawing, sketching and word association practices. We then take all of those drawings that the students and community members made, and create a unique mural that tells their story and the message they wanted to get across.
This way of working amplifies the students voices and centers them in the full creation process. They are able to see their actual drawings come to fruition on a large scale, which in turn brings civic, community and school pride.
We host a “paint party” day where we invite the students and the community members to paint alongside each other and have a hand in the actual painting of the mural as well.
Finally as an organization, we push our projects to use eco-friendly materials that take the health of the community into consideration when creating. We prefer to use a new air-purifying paint from an American paint company called Smog Armor. The Smog Armor paint contains zeolite minerals that sequester C02, odors and volatile organic compounds into the paint. This is a great way to introduce these materials to young communities and to chat about sustainability and the health of the community through our art practice.

The entire process can take a few days to a few weeks, depending on the size of wall, student involvement, etc.
On average this type of project has takes about 5 days.