Students' mural brightens homeless resource center

Friday, Dec. 23, 2016

SALT LAKE CITY — Juan Diego Catholic High School students spent many months creating a piece of art, which they installed just after the beginning of Advent at St. Vincent de Paul’s Weigand Homeless Resource Center in Salt Lake City.

The finished mural is a springtime landscape. The focus of the mural is a tree, just beginning to bloom with tiny pink flowers. Birds sit on the branches. Behind the tree, dark green hills rise, with snowy white mountains peeking over the horizon.

“The tree represents strength, growth and shelter,” said Jim McGee, JDCHS’ art teacher, adding that he hoped “someone using this space can feel these things.”

The mural was donated to the Weigand Homeless Resource Center by members of the Juan Diego Art Club and some of McGee’s art class students.

This is the second mural that McGee’s students have donated to CCS. Last year, they installed one at CCS’ Joyce Hansen Hall Food Bank in Ogden that depicted agriculture and the Ogden community.

McGee, who also created the murals that adorn the interior of Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Orem, said he began looking for a way for his students to do murals as a service project, and so got in contact with Matthew Melville, associate director of the resource center.

Melville showed McGee around the Weigand Center, including the newly constructed computer room, which had plain white walls.

“When I walked into that computer room, it was depressing. … Very sparse,” McGee said.

Melville felt similarly. “It would be great to brighten up the room, to make it seem less institutionalized,” he said.

The computer room’s walls were broken only by a large window at one end. 

McGee remembered thinking, “It would be neat to have something like a window on the other end too.” 

A picture of a wild landscape would capture this intended effect perfectly, he thought. 

The two men decided that the computer room would be the destination for the mural. 

Although this decision was made early in the spring, brush didn’t meet canvas until October, McGee said. Then, as art club students began meeting weekly to work on the mural and as advanced art students helped out as well, it began to take form, McGee said.

Finally, on Dec. 3, the canvases were installed in the computer room. 

Melville praised the students’ willingness to help the homeless. He said that he wished that other students and people everywhere could see the struggle that people without homes face every day.

“It’s very beneficial for (the students) to see this side of the valley,” he said. “If you’re living out in Draper, you might forget there are real homeless people here.”

Will Vincent, a homeless man who uses the computer room, said the artwork is “awesome. It’s like an actual window.” 

Vincent was one of the first people to see it completed, he said. Melville asked Vincent if he said anything to the students working on the mural. 

“I said ‘thank you,’” Vincent said.