Home > Carving > Organized Graffiti: (Carving) Knives to the Walls
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Organized Graffiti: (Carving) Knives to the Walls
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| Student Brendan Koeniger works on carving a mahogany panel that's part of his graduation requirements. |
Students at the Belmont Hill School always leave their marks on the walls - just like they're supposed to. Since 1923, over 3,000 of them have picked up a chisel and created what woodworking instructor Steven Kaplan calls "organized graffiti": the 12" x 12" carved panel that's part of their graduation requirements.
It's illuminating to look at how subjects have changed over the years, Steven says. For example, if you look around one of the meeting rooms at the Belmont, Massachusetts private boys' school, he said, "You see a lot of war images. There's one of Mussolini running, with a symbol of Italy in the background; one with the face of Churchill; and another featuring American warships on the waters. If you look at the dates and the names, it's '44, '45, '46. Those are images about the times." In contrast, he said, panels from the early 1990s are more whimsical, with subjects like advertising logos Tony the Tiger or Coca Cola®.
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| Belmont Hill woodworking instructor Steven Kaplan says there’s "about 10 more years' worth of space on campus" for students' carvings. |
Whatever their choice of subject, the panels mean that the boys "leave their mark on the campus," Steven said. It's a tradition that dates back to the school's first headmaster. One reason the practice has continued, says Steven, is that the panels symbolize the boys' saying, "I'm able to handle whatever you're going to give me.
"I tell my students that when you're 14, 15 years old, you have very little control over your lives. You can't control whether you go to school or not - they can barely control their bodies - but you can control what happens to a piece of wood. They like that."
Even students who have never taken a woodworking class are expected to complete a panel. To help them out, Steven spends a 40 minute class showing them how to hold the tool and safely push it into the wood, then breaks the work down into a series of small tasks. "A lot of times the kids, after being shown steps one and two, will intuitively figure out steps three and four," he said.
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| This year's graduates will chisel out 72 new panels for Belmont Hill's walls. They're the first thing campus visitors notice. |
Figuring out the panels' subjects, however, is up to the boys. They can follow three different approaches, Steven says. They can choose an artistic image that's "neat to look at", something personal to them - like hockey skates for a hockey player, or something that reflects the times. Of course, they've had the opportunity to think about their panel since their first day at Belmont, when part of orientation involves presenting each student with a piece of paper and asking him to draw what his panel would look like if he had to do it right then. Panels from students who graduated in previous years line the hallways, the dining hall walls and more.
Steven carved his own panel in the early 1980s. "I did my panel on the last M*A*S*H because it was important in my life at the time," he said. Although he might choose a different subject today, Steven appreciates that he, and his students, have had the opportunity to leave their mark on the walls.