Moeller's Chalk Competition

By Henry Meyer

At Moeller there is something unique that most other schools don’t have—the house system.

The house system is important to the core of Moeller’s identity, and throughout the year, students and houses compete for points in the house cup. The chalk mural event is among the first competitions of the year and was held on Friday, September 16th.

The Moeller chalk mural competition sees multiple students from every house go to the track for three and a half hours to produce multiple pieces of art. What these students draw is based around the year’s interdisciplinary theme. This year, Moeller’s artists were challenged to try to capture “Civil Discourse” in a colorful piece of art.

During the chalk mural contest, the competition was heated from the start. Every house had a de facto leader who came prepared with a design for their murals. “Our house group came up with our ideas in a meeting before the event itself,” freshman competitor Steve Schutte said. “This is where we brainstormed to come up with our basic idea, which would be better fleshed out during the competition. Given that the basic theme was civility, most of the groups had the same ideas of peace and justice.”

Trinity House addresses this year’s theme of Civil Discourse through their chalk mural.

The true challenge for the artists came from the execution of the ideas rather than the envisioning of them. Every team had to budget out what colors they used because they only had a bit of each, which made it hard for them to create major backgrounds or overuse one tone. This led to every piece of art having an extensive range of colors. The art pieces had to make use of blending colors together with either brushes or hands to create different shades. House teams would also segment into smaller groups for different tasks such as blending, filling in colors, or line work. This was so they could effectively and efficiently finish their art pieces by having multiple specialized groups.

 The chalk mural really was a form of expression for the school and a show of the talent at Moeller. It was a beautiful display of what Moeller students can accomplish when they work together. With the chalk mural concluded and art pieces finished, students are looking forward to the next house event!