The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal • January through April 2023 • Page 72
Student Mosaics at the Steiner School —
A Culmination of an Inspired Education By Sandor Slomovits It is a custom at many high schools for each graduating class to give a gift to the school. Seniors typically raise money to buy a bench, a tree, or perhaps to create a scholarship fund. The class gift tradition at the Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor High School is different—it is built right into the curriculum. Almost every year since the school graduated its first class in 2000, the seniors, under the direction of the school’s art teachers, Elena Efimova, Riccardo Capraro, and Nataliya Pryzant, create a large mosaic that is then permanently mounted at the school’s Pontiac Trail campus building. The resulting mosaics are remarkable in a number of ways and fulfill several functions. First, there’s their size. Last year’s piece, for example, is eight feet by eight feet, which in square footage doesn’t even qualify it into the top three of the fourteen mosaics that students have created over the years. The largest is twelve feet by thirty. But the mosaics are more notable for the quality of their craftsmanship, the wide variety of their subject matter, and for the broad range of artistic styles they employ: from representational art, such as very realistic portraits of Martin Luther King, Frida Kahlo, and Beethoven, to one inspired by an abstract Kandinsky painting; from a periodic table of elements, now hung in the chemistry lab, to panels designed around a Fibonacci spiral. Some, like the class of 2022’s landscape nature scene, a path winding past water and woods to a sunlit valley, use primarily earth tones, others, like the Fibonacci, employ a limited palette, mostly blues and gold, while still others display a varied assortment of vivid hues. The mosaic class gift tradition began in 2000 with RSSAA’s first high school graduating class and was initiated by Efimova who has taught at the school since 1996. In her confident, direct, sure way of speaking, she conveys a great deal of enthusiasm when
talking about these projects and her students’ art. “By training I am an architect and I have a good feeling for a space. My passion is interior design. I have a feeling for how to beautify a space. The beauty of the students’ work creates an absolutely different mood. People even move through the hallways differently. They constantly stay by the walls when they see that there’s a new art project displayed. And we always display all the students’ art.”
It is a custom at many high schools for each graduating class to give a gift to the school. Seniors typically raise money to buy a bench, a tree, or perhaps to create a scholarship fund. The class gift tradition at the Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor High School is different—it is built right into the curriculum. The five graduating seniors in that first year made individual mosaic panels that they eventually decided were too large to take home, so they gifted them to the school. Those now hang in the RSSAA‘s Lower School on Newport Road. In 2002, before the High School moved onto its own campus, classes were housed in the basement of the Genesis church/synagogue on Packard. Perhaps influenced by their location, the class of 2002 decided the theme of their mosaic would be the seven days of creation.