#WhyYouMatter Portraits
Prep for Hanging
We took our time to prep before the hanging. This included multiple meetings about the placement of the photographs. As artists, we imagined a "gallery walk". We wanted people to time with each picture and not be overwhelmed with a stacked wall of images. We decided on a walk through that spanned our entire Commons (Lunch Room) and through two floors at the center of our building. The pictures were each touching each other in their final placement- a chain link, continuous with no student left alone.
Other prep included:
- Measuring each wall and figuring out exactly how many posters would fit in each space.
- Marking each wall with the Team Leader's name.
- Cutting the Utac and dividing it into bags for each Team Leader.
- Made posters- including for the #WhyYouMatter wall.
- Made flyers for around town and for sharing on social media.
- Placing red, duct taped arrows on the floor indicating the flow of the gallery walk.
- Paint the rock!
The posters were organized randomly on each wall, so no grade had a specific section. The gallery walk was roughly in alphabetical order based on the grade.
When organizing what posters would be where, we split up the number of posters on the wall by each grade. We wanted the right proportion of each grade to be on every wall for the amount of space we had, but each wall had a different amount of posters. For example, the first wall needed 20 seniors, 21 juniors, 23 sophomores, 21 freshmen, and 9 staff members.
The system was not perfect and we ended up with a lot of sophomores left over to go in one folder. We mixed up the posters that were already in folders to fit all the sophomores on different walls. This is why it is roughly alphabetical. This made it easy when kids had difficulties finding their posters because we could tell them exactly what wall they could find it on.
