The Senior Wall: A Legacy of Artwork

0
597
This year’s mural features a geometric background and a fiery lion, with the words “Mighty Pride.” The number 19 embedded into the word “Mighty” honors the seniors’ year of high school graduation, and the handprints on the bottom left are the signatures of the artists. (Photo courtesy of Jannah Said)

Senior year is a bittersweet one as the twelfth graders wrap up their time in high school and move into the real world. These graduating students seize opportunities to leave their own mark on the school. As a tribute to the Pride and in commemoration of their time at Leesville, a handful of 12th graders take to the Senior Wall. There, they transform their legacy into artwork — and the class of 2019’s legacy is not one to forget.

Right outside the Main Building and in front of the back loop, the Senior Wall displays the design, craftsmanship and passion of this year’s chosen student artists. For years it has been a place where seniors have the opportunity to produce a mural representing the Home of the Pride in their own perspective. The art stays on the wall through the school year, graduation, and the summer. The seniors’ mark remains after they leave, until it’s time for the new senior class to create a display of their own.

Lizzie Henshall, this year’s designer, hopes her masterpiece will inspire fellow students to bond and unite. “To me, it’s a sense of pride throughout the whole school,” she said. “There’s a lot of color on the wall, and there’s a lot of geometric shapes, so you can say that, like, it all comes together to make one…. kind of like school comes together…. different colors, different shapes.”

However, the creation and execution of the mural was no easy feat. The group faced many challenges, including scale and precision. “Creating it on a piece of paper was easy- -well, not easy, but easier than the wall- and then you get, and you see this big, blank wall and you’re like, ‘Wow. It’s huge,’” Henshall laughed. “The process was a lot of measuring, a lot of rulers….. We really wanted to make it neat, very neat, very geometric, very straight, precise lines.”

The Senior Wall is a custom that instills a sense of unity and commemorates the countless people, lives, and tales that have traveled through our hallways. It’s a tribute to the place where we learn, change, and grow up – – and to all the people who were there along the way.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.