The Sun
Sunnyvale's Newspaper

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

This mural at Bishop Elementary School--painted mostly by students at the school--is a pictorial history of Sunnyvale. Mansol Lopez, Edgar Negrete, Jose Martinez and Chessa and Christopher Duran (pictured from left to right) are a few of the many kids who helped create it.

Mural teaches history

By Steve Enders

It's not often that elementary school students get a taste of art history and technique, geography and history all in one class.

For students in Linda Gilbert's resource classes at Bishop Elementary in Sunnyvale, they're getting that and more--a chance to paint all over a very large wall.

At the corner of Maude and Sunnyvale avenues at the school, the mural stands tall and wide and serves as a testament to Sunnyvale's history.

Passersby in their cars or on the sidewalks have the best view of the painting, as Gilbert tried to incorporate the school's natural surroundings in it.

The trees, grass and even a door in the wall were used as additions to the painting to give it a more lifelike feel. The colors used in the painting match the colors in the real-life foreground. Gilbert, with the help of her students, painted a pair of doors leading inside the school to look like the doors of Mission Santa Clara.

In a school that has a large Hispanic minority, Gilbert chose to give the kids a lesson in the works and life of Diego Rivera, one of the most famous painters to come out of Mexico in modern times.

"About 60 percent of my students are Hispanic," Gilbert said. "[Rivera] is prolific, he's world-famous and he's for the common people. Kids can identify with what he draws."

Rivera was noted for his murals of Mexico's working class and participation in uprisings that occurred there among laborers around the turn of the century.

He was also a very intelligent man who rapidly completed grade school and began painting at a very young age. He left Mexico to study and paint alongside masters such as Pablo Picasso in Paris, and then traveled to the United States, where many of his murals stand today.

Gilbert has taken it upon herself to study Rivera intensely over the past two years so that she could bring him into her lessons at Bishop.

"If [Rivera] did the history of Mexico [in a mural], then why don't we do the history of Sunnyvale?" she said she asked herself.

Starting on the left-hand side of the wall, the work takes a look at what life was like before Western culture was introduced to the area. The Ohlone Indians inhabited the region with grass huts on the marshland that was the edge of San Francisco Bay.

The retrospective then moves through the mission period, the founding of Sunnyvale by Martin Murphy and the orchards that dominated the landscape through the 1960s.

The mural will end with the modern industrial era, with a dirigible, a Libby's can and the computer industry all represented. Finally, on the far right side, children will get to paint their own histories in squares on the wall.

Because of bad weather, and now that the end of the school year is coming, Gilbert has had to put the finishing touches on hold.

"It's going to be huge," she said. "It's going to be a challenge to put all the people in who have contributed to education at this school."

Marisol Lopez, one of Gilbert's fourth-graders, said she was excited to work on the project.

"It was fun because it was my first day painting," she said. An immigrant from Mexico, Lopez isn't sure what she'll put in her square, but said she's looking forward to painting it next year.

Assistant principal Frances Dampier furthered the notion that the mural serves the kids in many ways.

"It's a fantastic contribution to the whole community, not just the school," she said. "Can you imagine when [the students are] older, driving by with their kids and saying, 'I helped do that.' She's done a remarkable job."

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Mural teaches history

The Sun
Sunnyvale's Newspaper