In the spring of my freshman year at Columbia, I took one of my first big leaps of faith academically. I had received an email newsletter from the Art & Design departments that featured a few classes that were going to be offered in the upcoming semester. If I remember correctly, I saw the email late, after I had already registered for a full course load of classes. The featured photo that I scrolled to in the newsletter was of a giant mural of an eagle and a lion. Underneath, the title was “Special Issues in Illustration: Murals.” I read the description and was instantly sold. I logged into our MyColumbia portal right then and there, changing around anything that conflicted so I could register for the class.

Professor Cheri Lee Charlton teaches one of the most engaging and fun classes at Columbia, and has now for three semesters. I was lucky enough to be a part of that first section of her Murals class, and being a part of it has largely shaped the rest of my time at Columbia. Funnily enough, murals also were, inadvertently, a large part of how I ended up at Columbia, as well.

In my junior year of high school, I ended up leaving the school district I had gone to school since kindergarten in. I had wanted to get out of the environment where I had been bullied for many years, but it had never felt feasible. I was very involved in Orchestra as a cellist, and I loved taking German as a language. Eventually, my mental health declined to the point where it was no longer a choice. After receiving treatment and support outside of school, I ended up somewhere completely different – Avalon School in St. Paul, MN.

Starting school at Avalon felt like culture shock in a lot of ways. It is a student-focused, project-based public charter school. The idea that I was being encouraged to study whatever I wanted for my first project – which ended up being arranging and learning to play a piano version of a favorite song by my favorite band – was wild to me. It certainly was not all that fun (as my teacher Kevin can attest to from all the hours he had to sit next to me while I watched Crash Course: European History) but it was very different that what I was used to.

One of the projects that I completed during my time at Avalon was proposed to fulfill a geography-related standard in the Social Studies curriculum. I researched and created maps of where various murals existed at the time in three cities: Minneapolis, MN, Chicago, IL, and Seattle, WA. When I came to Chicago and toured Columbia for the first time, I realized that “The Moose” on the 33 Ida B Wells building was one of the murals that I mapped for Chicago!

All of this is to say, seeing this huge familiar face while walking around my first ever college-campus tour felt like a big sign that I was in the right place. The email I received from the Design Department with the picture of Cheri in front of her mural in Morocco (which was her largest to date, prior to the completion of her Curious Bunny on the side of the Columbia Student Center in the summer of 2024!) felt like a similar sign.

Being a part of the Murals class had a bit of a learning curve, a lot like Avalon. It was my first experience being in a class that was almost completely made up of students not in my major. This may have cemented my feelings of being intimidated by Illustration students – but I think I would have had that fear, regardless of whether I was in a class full of illustrators. It taught me about the importance, and difficulty, of being able to adapt your skills in one medium to another field – for example, I created my first personal mural draft completely in Adobe Illustrator, as that was the program I felt most comfortable using at the time, and Cheri was both slightly impressed and a little scared for my wellbeing.

I was really lucky to conquer enough of that learning curve by our final project and have a really great experience. We were given a large blank wall in the Student Center, and worked with a team from the College, as if they were our clients, to design a mural for the space. Myself and two other Illustration students were designated co-leaders of the project. I took on a lot of mashing various artists’ ideas together using Photoshop, creating mockups of what said mashups would look like on our wall, helping with projecting the finalized line drawing onto the wall, and eventually finalizing the colored design that we printed out to use as references when painting.

When we got deep into the painting process, I got really sucked into it. One thing I have learned about myself during my time at Columbia is that when I really like a process, I would rather dive into it and explore that medium fully, rather than continuing to focus on multiple mediums. I spent a lot of time outside of class working on parts of the mural on my own. I also worked to organize spreadsheets and tools for other people to commit to working on the mural outside of class.

I unfortunately never got final pictures of the mural, and looking back through the pictures I took during this time period reminded me of how much of a “push-to-the-finish” this project was. We did not even start outlining on the wall until the class before Thanksgiving break, and did not get paint on the wall until the final weeks of the semester. From what I have heard, this process has been streamlined in the two following sessions of Murals class. For example, one of my roommates has been taking Murals this semester, and their color is almost fully on the wall before thanksgiving, with some of the line work as well. It has been cool to watch them working through the assignments in their own way, though I definitely have been jealous and missing the class. Cheri invited me to come help them paint, but I work at the time of their class.

All of this to say, it’s a good reminder that the feelings I am feeling right now about struggling at the end of the semester, have been felt by me many times before, and it has turned out okay so far. I feel so grateful for all of the projects I have been a part of, both at Columbia and during my time in high school at Avalon. Taking Special Issues in Illustration: Murals during my sophomore year really set me on track for the rest of my time at Columbia, where I would go on to participate in study abroad trips, and various printmaking and fabrication classes. Thanks so much for reading!