Jordan Mott MS: Five Houses

Thrive Collective created a series of five murals for the school corridors from the gym to the cafeteria, focusing on themes of kindness, empathy, and equity through classroom discussions and artwork.  We worked with one general 7th-grade class, and one mural-focused class of 6-8th grades. About 50 kids total, with a number of them coming and going.

Students of Jordan Mott Middle School are divided into five houses, each represented by an animal and color. Throughout the year the houses compete against each other. The purpose of the competition is to motivate students to excel academically and behaviorally. However, competition can also breed intense rivalry. Thrive artists aimed to counter some of that rivalry by asking students to create something together: murals. In one of the class assignments, students were asked to depict their house being kind to another house by drawing their houses’ animals interacting with each other.

We combined a couple of these drawn concepts with characters, both human and animal, to represent the houses and illustrated quotes about kindness, empathy, and equity. By including each house’s representative color and adding rainbows to represent the LGBTQ community, we created lively, vibrant halls through the middle school’s basement.