Continuous Mural
Create a collaborative, continuous mural of your environment

T. J. Wilcox used his imagination and state of the art technology to create his panorama of New York City. Ask students to find and/or draw images of the place where they live and experiment with creating a collaborative, continuous mural of their environment. If exact images are not available, find images in magazines, newspapers, or other ephemera such as brochures, pamphlets, or maps that would represent a park, rooftops, sky, etc. Students can layer and/or overlap images and drawings so that they form a single cityscape or landscape. If students are drawing, they may want to go outside, form a circle facing outward, and draw what they see from their perspective.

What types of images appear in their mural? What types of drawn images were included? Are there images of shared space, such as parks? Were any aspects of their environment repeated or found in more than one place in the mural? Why do students think that may have occurred?

Ask younger students to draw the street where they live or where their school is. What did they include and/or leave out? What is special about their street? 

Projected image curved around a screen.
Projected image curved around a screen.

Installation view of T. J. Wilcox: In the Air, 2013 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 19, 2013-February 9, 2014). Photograph by Bill Orcutt

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.