The white entry walls of Wessington Springs Elementary have come alive with color and creativity thanks to a special artist-in-residence project led by celebrated South Dakota artist Mary Wipf.
Sponsored by the Springs Area Council of the Arts (SACOTA), with support from the South Dakota Arts Council, SACC, and the Wessington Springs Area Community Foundation, the residency invited 120 elementary students from grades 1 through 6 to help design and paint a largescale mural in the school’s entry.
“Each student created a drawing, and then together we talked about design elements and how your eye moves through a composition, plus how colors can make areas feel more active,” Wipf explained.
First and second graders painted once, while older students returned multiple times to add details and layers. Fourth and fifth graders, especially, were reluctant to put down their brushes.
“They didn’t want to be done,” Wipf said, smiling. “For these fifth graders, being the last kids to paint was kind of awesome for them.”
The finished mural celebrates life in and around Wessington Springs: farm fields, basketball hoops, band instruments and neighborhood scenes blend with nature elements like bright lily pads, cattails and even a turtle, a nod to the community’s longstanding tradition of turtle races.
Fifth grader Journey Johnson said she loves how the mural “shows all the things we do at school and where we live.” Liberty Mikkelson enjoyed “painting on the wall and seeing how it kept coming together. You didn’t have any idea what the colors would look like until it was done.”
Hadley Weber said her favorite part was “coming back to layer more coats and make the colors brighter.”
Dawson Bultsma was partial to the farming section, especially the combine, which Wipf said was the most controversial element in the mural.
Wipf said that the color choice was a big debate between green or red.
“So we did them all: yellow, green, red, black, blue,” Wipf said with a laugh.
For Wipf, this residency marks another chapter in a 42year career as a teaching artist. Recipient of the 2024 South Dakota Governor’s Award for Outstanding Service in Arts Education, she has led nearly 1,000 weeks of artist residencies across the state, in schools, hospitals, libraries, and community centers.
In the history of the Artists in Schools & Communities grant program, no single artist has completed more weeks as a visiting artist in residence in more settings.
Wipf said her goal isn’t necessarily to make artists out of her students but to help them connect with the world through creativity.
“It’s about developing skills, forming neural connections in the brain, and learning to really see,” she said. “Through the arts we teach science, math and vocabulary. It’s also social and cultural learning too. The arts engage the mind in many different ways.”
The mural, filled with warm golds, cool blues, and bright strokes of imagination, now greets students and staff each morning as a vibrant reflection of who they are and where they live.
As Wipf packed up her brushes after ten days of painting, she left behind more than a mural, she left inspiration.
“The mural starts with kids’ drawings and ends with their brush strokes on the wall,” she said. “That’s what makes it unique, it belongs to them.”