Art teacher's mural project stirs passers-by to make their mark

Trenton native Elissa Horan outlined a fuchsia heart on the center of a 5-by-16 canvas propped up on the sidewalk at 15th and Market streets yesterday morning.

A few minutes later, Delbert Franklin, a 58-year-old retiree, took off his suit jacket to add black and green to the heart, painting the words, "Red for the people" inside. Franklin saw the nearly-blank canvas and table full of art supplies on his way out of City Hall and felt compelled to stop.

"I kind of felt a little down today, but this kind of uplifted me and made me feel like I was a part of something," Franklin said.

Horan's outdoor mural project, titled "What kind of mark will you make?," started in June in downtown Trenton. Horan encourages passersby to paint whatever they choose on a large canvas while she films them. Before they start, participants fill out a note card, answering the question, "What kind of mark will you make?"

"I wanted to draw the public to have an experience instead of me being the artist," said Horan, 43. "I wanted to remove myself from any control over the media or process and let the participants create spontaneously, like they did when they were faced with a blank sheet of paper and crayons or paint for the first time."

Horan, an art teacher at Sharon Elementary School in Robbinsville, N.J., sees her students create art with their imaginations, something she hopes to rebuild inside the minds of adults.

"People lose connection at some point with art," Horan said. "Hopefully they'll go home and remember that feeling and make art again."

The idea behind "What kind of mark will you make?" began two years ago when Horan was still a graduate student at the Columbia University Teachers College in New York City, where she graduated with a master's degree in art education. There, an instructor provided her class with various materials and large sheets of paper and told them to "explore the media in their own way with no direction."

Horan is applying the concept to communities and decided to bring the project to Philadelphia in hopes of diversifying the artwork. Messages to "stop the violence" and drawings of the Philly Phanatic and landscapes covered the canvas by 3:30 midafternoon.

"In Philly there are a lot of tourists and people coming in from all over, so I was hoping to get a wider variety of people to come in," Horan said.

She succeeded. Sarah Gardner, a 19-year-old business major at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, was on her way to catch a flight home when she saw the opportunity to paint.

"It's kind of cool to be able to leave your mark somewhere else," said Gardner, who painted a green, yellow and purple dinosaur. "Sometimes online you'll watch the progression of one single artist paint a whole mural, but I've never seen something where the whole community can come in and put different parts to it."

Though Philadelphia is only the second mark on the project's map, Horan's goal is to spread the experience to other cities.

"Just like I have a mixture of people, I want a mixture of cities to represent different areas: low-key areas, relaxing areas, high-hype areas," Horan said.

Eventually, she would like to display the work in a museum where she can dedicate each wall to a different city, playing each painting's documentary-style video for visitors as they observe the art.

"My most important goal here is to document the process to show what people go through when they're painting," she said, adding that art is often lost on people who can't witness the process.

"I don't know where this is going to take me," she said. "If it takes me across the country, that's fine. If it takes me to a different country, that would be even better."