Community Collage

Our protective facemasks, during the COVID-19 pandemic, became a strange extension of ourselves. We fashioned them with bits of flair — embroidered flowers, characters from beloved movies, school mascots — so that we could reveal a radiance, a bit of our personalities the masks withheld. Thankfully discarded, these masks are now a reminder of what we each endured. With all this in mind, Maytal Zasler ’25 and a few of her classmates began working on a mural that speaks to our previous lockdown epoch.

Similar to the pandemic, the artwork itself required Maytal to think about what it meant to be a member of a larger community. It’s something she began considering in 8th Grade, back in 2021, when she was a member of the ChangeMaker club, exploring what Collegiate could do with protective face coverings once we were all able to shed our masks. As Middle Schoolers, the ChangeMaker club spoke to entrepreneurial professionals and Collegiate teachers. The School invited several experts to Zoom in and collaborate with the club: Edie Ure, a natural dye artisan based in Boulder, Colorado; McKenzie Piper, CEO of TekStyle; Holly Smith, a former Lower School visual arts teacher; Catherine Clements, Middle School librarian; Teresa Coleman, a Middle School art teacher; and Gini Bonnel, the artist responsible for the illustrious ‘Be Kind’ signs. Out of these conversations Maytal landed on the idea of a piece of art that involved the community and gave clarity to the cacophony that was the pandemic. 

For two years Maytal collected masks, from all three divisions, until she felt she had enough to begin assembling her community mural. For a project of this sort, collage seemed to Maytal the most apt medium for contemplating the moment we were in. “The combination of different masks represent the individual struggles and the different obstacles people encountered,” she says. “Although we all suffered through this moment it affected us all very differently.” Each mask pasted on paper expresses our individual solitudes dictated by a shared experience. We were alone, together. 

Once assembled, the masks form the shape of a tree, a distinct symbol of growth. “A tree seemed the obvious form the mural should take,” Maytal says. “I kept returning to the idea of how we grew as people throughout COVID.”

The mural, similar to any community, contains surprising disjunctions that join in a harmonious whole: every mask, worn by someone else with a unique experience, has its own personality. The masks flash with individual color, shape and size, but they create one image. “The mural really shows how the Collegiate community has come together out of this,” Maytal says. 

In H2L2, the Upper School art room, as Maytal and her classmates arrange the mural — turning a bright green mask into a leaf in the tree, placing a blue one in the surrounding sky — the students take time to reflect on the last few years. It’s the kind of space that art uniquely allows: an arena for quiet contemplation. Talking, gluing down the masks, one of the students comes up with the idea of painting the tree’s outline in silver — a silver lining, as it were. “It took a thing like the pandemic to remind people about what community means,” one student remarks, grabbing another mask from the large pile. “We each felt the pandemic differently. It was very disruptive, and despite that, positive, beautiful things have come from it, embodied by this tree.”