As Northside students walk the halls, they are surrounded by art. Some installations have been displayed for years, even decades, and to most students, they have become an ordinary background of the school.

Whether created as a class project, a community effort, or an individual student’s work that has inexplicably remained standing, every piece has a story.

Among the dozens of art installations around Northside, there is a unique type of installation called a “line project.”

As Ms. Joanne Minyo, one of Northside’s three art teachers, explains, a line project is “where [students] do a different section of the line and have to respond to what the people before them did.” The most recent example of this is the project made around five years ago spiraling up the main stairwell.

This line project will follow a Northside student all the way up to the third floor. It consists of hundreds of themed ceramic pieces that transition into each other. While walking up the stairs, one views meteors turning into spiders, fish becoming blueberries, or bananas turning into lucky charms.

Ms. Minyo, who led this project, says students were “thinking about … how to do a collective project that’s unified in some way.”

To complete this project, groups of students were given a section of space. Ms. Minyo explains how they had to “think about how they wanted to create multiples of something that incorporated ceramics, how they wanted to have those multiples move through the space, and how they were going to transition to what the next group was doing.”

The Remnants of Old Projects 

The main stairwell line project was not the first line project. In fact, there are remnants of past projects that are still a part of the Northside hallway aesthetic. One piece is a mysterious rocky structure that lives on the exterior part of the North end of the second floor. 

Ms. Minyo explains it was “part of a sculpture line that went through the whole space, and then at one point, it was supposed to look like it went out the window, ran under the rocks, and then exploded.”

Another mysterious installation is a collection of ceramic strawberries hanging from the ceiling of the second-floor atrium. Ms. Minyo explains how this was also once part of a ceramic line, one that “went through the window of the library, ran through the library, and then went out the library.”

The remnants of these past projects remind us that Northside has always been a building filled with art. Even when we have lost the context in which some of this art was created, it is still available for Northside students and teachers to be aware of and enjoy everyday. 

The Importance of Public Art 

The ability to hang up all of these art installations is a privilege that not all other schools have. Ms. Minyo says, “We’ve been really fortunate that our admin from the beginning has been okay with us just kind of doing weird things to the building.” 

The ability to publicly display art has also been important for Northside’s art program, particularly the sculpture classes. “You don’t often get those kinds of opportunities to make something really immersive or something really large,” said Ms. Minyo.

Public art also gives Northside students who participate something to remember about their time here, and as Ms.Minyo says, “it’s really cool for kids to have fingerprints all over the school.”

Not only is public art impactful for the students who create it, but also for those who get to experience it.