Story Staircases: The Art of Telling Tales

The Arts are central to the learning environment at Queen Vic. This is evident from the moment you enter the door…any door. The walls and staircases are adorned with the students’ poetry and prose, photography, graphics, installations of sculpture, painting, and proudly framed art work that celebrate and reflect knowledge and aspirations, heroes and sheroes, tributes to remarkable and inspirational leaders, musicians and artists from across generations and around the world—all coalescing into an aesthetic, uplifting and stimulating learning environment that rivals any renowned art gallery.

Queen Victoria Public School is situated in a ten-year-old building of modern architecture, the third incarnation in the school’s 120-year-old history. Gradually the grey cinderblock walls and stairwells are turning into hand painted art works under the leadership of the unstoppable school librarian Milica O’Brien.

The latest art piece, called Story Staircases, is perhaps the most ambitious project to date for any Toronto school. It is an interdisciplinary project that involves five stories of stairwells, exhausting to climb yet exhilarating to study.

Under the tutelage of O’Brien with Inner City Angels visual artist Charmaine Lurch and Mariposa In The Schools storyteller Marylyn Peringer, 190 grade 3 and 4 students have transformed these stairwell walls into vivid allegorical paintings reflecting fables and mythology that express universal values of love and friendship, loyalty, trust, compassion and integrity. The over 100 feet of winding and climbing art introduces us to brilliant leopards, spiders, snakes, frogs, turtles, rabbits, woodpeckers, deer, monkeys, swans, roosters, hoopoe birds and humans too—all interacting with each other and with their natural world. These are the children’s visual interpretations of the many stories told to the students by Peringer: Jataka tales from South Asia, narratives from Africa and Europe, from Jewish and First Nations traditions.

The project has taken six weeks to complete, and involves many collaborators including arts education partners Inner City Angels, Mariposa In The Schools, funder the Ontario Trillium Foundation and education partner York University represented by five new teacher candidates who joined the children in their art and design.
Please come and breathe it all in…and don’t take the elevator!