Graffiti News

A classroom book supplied the starting point

Students from Westview Elementary School and Shadle Park High School worked together on a mural in Spokane’s Garland Art Alley on June 2, 2026. According to Spokane Spokesman-Review, the painting session brought third-graders, high school leadership students and local muralist Desmond Boston to an alley near Post Street and Garland Avenue. Their shared wall connected a reading lesson with a place outside the classroom.

Westview third-grade teacher Tiffiny Santos was carrying out the project for a fourth year. Her class read Susan Verde’s book I Am We: A Book of Community, exploring the idea that looking after yourself can also serve a community. Hot-air balloons from the book, combined with mountain and lake scenery, became the basis for the students’ mural design.

The connection to community extended to the way the work was made. Younger pupils supplied ideas, an artist translated them into a workable draft, and older students helped prepare the painting session. For people following public art, that shared process offers another way to read the finished image: the subject is community, and its production involved cooperation across ages.

Student choices shaped the design before painting began

Boston built a digital rough draft from ideas proposed by the third-graders. The composition included four hot-air balloons, mountains, water and sea creatures. Santos’ pupils selected the creatures, including sharks. Their role therefore reached beyond filling in a design supplied entirely by adults; their choices helped determine what would appear on the wall.

Preparation mattered because the elementary school group had only an hour at the alley. Boston prepared the wall ahead of the visit, while Shadle Park students made paint-store trips, applied primer and helped organize the event. The brief painting session depended on work carried out before the younger children arrived.

Shadle Park senior Tanner Johnson planned the outing. Johnson and classmates also visited Westview to introduce the activity and build the children’s interest, then assisted Boston with preparations. In the newspaper’s account, Johnson emphasized the importance of connections between the high school and its feeder schools. The mural gave those connections a practical setting and a shared task.

Pairs of younger and older students filled the wall

Each third-grader teamed up with a high school student to paint an assigned creature. The arrangement carried the collaboration into the painting itself: older students worked alongside the children whose ideas had helped shape the composition. The newspaper described greetings, dancing and hugs as the elementary school group arrived by bus.

Third-grader Liam Livingstone painted a rubber duck at the center of the mural with Shadle Park senior Maddie Mann, a family friend. Livingstone associated the book and painting activity with creativity, particularly the freedom to choose colors. That small detail helps explain how individual decisions could remain visible within a larger group design.

Another Shadle Park senior, Ethan Cabrera, lifted children onto his shoulders so they could paint the hot-air balloons. Cabrera hopes to become a special education teacher and told the newspaper that working with children was part of the leadership class’s appeal. Assistance with reaching the wall was one concrete expression of the project’s wider theme of mutual support.

The alley holds work from more than one class

The new mural faces a work made by the previous class, giving visitors two school projects to consider together. Garland Art Alley curator Julie Shepard helped Santos’ class find wall space. Shepard described the activity as a community project that gives children a sense of ownership, according to the newspaper.

For a visit, the reported location is Garland Art Alley near Post Street and Garland Avenue in Spokane. Look for the four balloons, the mountain-and-water setting and the creatures selected by the pupils. Comparing the wall with the earlier class’s mural across the alley adds another layer: the setting records successive groups’ contributions to the same neighborhood space. The relationship between those walls is part of the experience alongside the individual painted details.

Explore nearby murals on Wallscape’s map.

Source: Spokane Spokesman-Review