Artwork > Community Mural Projects > Youth Projects > Schools

Growing Inclusion, 2014
Binah School, Sharon

This colorful mural was designed and painted by students from The Binah School under the direction of professional muralist, Tova Speter. It highlights themes of inclusion, support, and connections, as well as a love for people of all abilities. Over 100 community members participated in the project, which hopes to raise awareness and inspire people to accept and embrace diversity.

Read below for the artist statement written by the students:

“Growing Inclusion”

This mural created by The Binah School and the surrounding communities is inspired by themes of Inclusion, Diversity, and Mutual Responsibility - Areyvut. Areyvut is a principle embodied in Jewish texts of being responsible for the people around you. Everyone has the right to be included and feel that they matter, regardless of their abilities. It is not a bad thing to be different; everyone is unique and deserves to be accepted and treated equally.

Our goal for this mural is to raise awareness about the fact that people with disabilities are not always included or given the same opportunities as others; and to inspire people to accept and embrace diversity.

We feel it is important to stand up for this issue; as Dina Halper-Rosenthal, a ninth grader at The Binah School said, “We are all valuable and ability or disability just doesn’t matter.”

The main image symbolizes a tree of life and shows people of different abilities all supporting each other in order to keep the tree alive. It shows how all life is connected by the roots of humanity. The trunk of the tree forms a heart, symbolizing the love that unites us all. The circles in the bark represent the circles of responsibility. Circles of responsibility are the different levels that we are responsible for each other. Everyone has the same basic rights as each other because we are all people. The leaves of the tree are made up of different people, each painted by the Binah students in different colors and patterns to show how diverse all the people are who branch off the tree of life. The roots show how we are all rooted in tradition, and have words that we feel are the foundation of our message of Inclusion (they are also included in Braille in order to make our mural fully inclusive).

In order to create the mural we involved many community members. We made plaster casts of our hands to represent reaching out and then brought them with us on field trips. As we connected with people of different abilities, we engaged them to paint our hands and worked together to create a plaster cast of their hands too. We brought their hands to the next group to be painted and so on. Together the people who made and painted these handprints created a chain of art in which everyone contributed to something that someone else made, and everyone made something for someone else to contribute to in a future visit to a different community. The process of people from different communities with different abilities making the hands embodies the themes of inclusion, diversity and responsibility for each other as represented in the mural. We also brought bright colorful flowers to different communities and over 150 people of varying abilities participated in each filling in one piece of the puzzle to make up the flowers. We are all pieces of a greater community and we hope the mural can remind people that we are all connected.

Lastly, we highlighted the words Smile and Dream using sign language so that people can learn how to sign and communicate with others. We hope to inspire everyone who experiences this mural to smile when they see the new colorful mural at the beach, to dream of a more inclusive community, and to then take positive action to strengthen the Sharon community and beyond.