Student Mosaics at the Steiner School — A Culmination of an Inspired Education

By Sandor Slomovits

It is a custom at many high schools for each graduating class to give a gift to the school. Seniors typically raise money to buy a bench, a tree, or perhaps to create a scholarship fund. The class gift tradition at the Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor High School is different—it is built right into the curriculum. Almost every year since the school graduated its first class in 2000, the seniors, under the direction of the school’s art teachers, Elena Efimova, Riccardo Capraro, and Nataliya Pryzant, create a large mosaic that is then permanently mounted at the school’s Pontiac Trail campus building. The resulting mosaics are remarkable in a number of ways and fulfill several functions. First, there’s their size. Last year’s piece, for example, is eight feet by eight feet, which in square footage doesn’t even qualify it into the top three of the fourteen mosaics that students have created over the years. The largest is twelve feet by thirty. But the mosaics are more notable for the quality of their craftsmanship, the wide variety of their subject matter, and for the broad range of artistic styles they employ: from representational art, such as very realistic portraits of Martin Luther King, Frida Kahlo, and Beethoven, to one inspired by an abstract Kandinsky painting; from a periodic table of elements, now hung in the chemistry lab, to panels designed around a Fibonacci spiral. Some, like the class of 2022’s landscape nature scene, a path winding past water and woods to a sunlit valley, use primarily earth tones, others, like the Fibonacci, employ a limited palette, mostly blues and gold, while still others display a varied assortment of vivid hues.

The mosaic class gift tradition began in 2000 with RSSAA’s first high school graduating class and was initiated by Efimova who has taught at the school since 1996. In her confident, direct, sure way of speaking, she conveys a great deal of enthusiasm when talking about these projects and her students’ art. “By training I am an architect and I have a good feeling for a space. My passion is interior design. I have a feeling for how to beautify a space. The beauty of the students’ work creates an absolutely different mood. People even move through the hallways differently. They constantly stay by the walls when they see that there’s a new art project displayed. And we always display all the students’ art.”

The five graduating seniors in that first year made individual mosaic panels that they eventually decided were too large to take home, so they gifted them to the school. Those now hang in the RSSAA‘s Lower School on Newport Road. In 2002, before the High School moved onto its own campus, classes were housed in the basement of the Genesis church/synagogue on Packard. Perhaps influenced by their location, the class of 2002 decided the theme of their mosaic would be the seven days of creation. That set the template for all the projects that have followed. Subsequent mosaics have continued to reflect the unique character and circumstances of each class, and its particular interests, while also incorporating elements from the entire Steiner curriculum. The students also often find creative ways of co-mingling elements of different cultures and traditions they have studied into the collages. For example, the class of 2022’s pastoral scene has embedded in it a subtle yin yang symbol. Margot Amrine, the high school’s Humanities teacher says, “What I love is how they reinterpret.” In the seven days of creation mosaic, “the fish is very much inspired by Inuit, Tlingit, Northwest art. The last panel, the day of rest, they decided to do a kind of Buddha with a sort of Hindu cat, and you also see the four elements. So, it’s a very unique and different interpretation, but kind of out of their four years in the Genesis building. There’s been some kind of story every year.” 

In 2016 the subject of the class mosaic was Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The sky and stars are faithfully, artistically reproduced but, unlike in the masterpiece, there is no enormous cypress tree dominating the foreground, and the sleepy little village in van Gogh’s painting has been replaced by the skylines of Detroit, Florence, Italy (complete with its famous Giotto’s Tower), and Ann Arbor—featuring the Bell Tower. 

Since 2001 (with the exception of pandemic-disrupted 2020 and 2021) every RSSAA senior class has spent a week in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, and Rome, witnessing first-hand the art, architecture, mathematics, physics, and literature that they have been studying throughout their Steiner education. 

“What started the Italy trip? We have to say thank you to the Soviet Union,” laughs Efimova. “Growing up and living there I was not able to travel, and I knew that I would never travel anywhere. So, my traveling was on the pages of beautiful art books. But some professors in our school from time to time were going somewhere, invited to conferences or whatever. So once, our class professor out of the blue said, ‘You know, children, if you have a chance to travel somewhere only once, choose Venice.’ And this seed was planted in my head. Twenty-five years later it started growing. It happened because during our class, [at the Steiner School] the seniors of the class of 2000 started a discussion about senior trips. And that’s how I found out that this is a culture in American schools. The senior class, where should they go? They went to New Orleans. I asked them about the experience, and I thought, ‘why have just a trip, if it could be a grand trip?’ We need to go to Venice. I Googled and found out that Venice has a Waldorf school, and their school has a guest house. I had the crazy idea that we need to take seniors to Italy. But who would listen to me? I was new in the school. I said, ‘I need one more crazy person.’ And it turned out to be Margot [Amrine],” she said, chuckling.

“I said, ‘Margot, I have an idea. We have to take the students to Italy.’ And she said, ‘Yes, we do.’ We made a presentation to the faculty college and the board, and it was approved and it was wonderful. In 2001, in February and March, we took the first class to Venice, and we stayed in the guest house of the Waldorf school on the mainland, not on the island of Venice. We just took a bus to Florence, just day trips without staying overnight. The next year was 2002. In September of 2001, 9/11 happened and all schools, and the University of Michigan, everybody canceled international trips, but our school, again by a miracle, was approved to go. And in the spring of 2002 we made it so that our time in Venice and Florence got an equal amount of time. The next year one student said, ‘I can’t imagine going to Italy and not seeing the Colosseum.’ So, we made the trip [consist of] Venice, Florence, and Rome. And that’s how it has stayed since then. We have had very strong support from our administration, and now it is a tradition.

Amrine says, “The trip, and then this studio mosaic project brings together many, many different threads from what they’ve studied.” Informed and inspired by what they have seen in Italy, including visiting the famed Orsoni glass-making factory where they observe glass blowing and glass cutting by hand, the students begin working on the class mosaic upon their return home in April, often incorporating some glass they have brought back from Italy. 

The entire process, from start to finish, is highly collaborative. Usually, Efimova, relying on her training in architecture, selects the location and suggests the theme, keeping in mind the practical constraints of the project, as well as her extensive knowledge of the class, having worked with them throughout high school and often even in their lower school years. Sometimes, as with the Kandinsky, she proposes the image, but the rest of the faculty and the seniors either respond enthusiastically or another suggestion is debated and modified. Students have to find a way to both say what they want to say and also listen to what everybody else has to say. Occasionally, as with the Fibonacci spiral or the large map of the world for the history room, it’s a student who comes up with the final idea. “It’s a great hidden lesson for students, working together as a group,” says Capraro, who has worked in the commercial art world. “You have to try to get everybody on board about a design. Yyou’ve got a deadline. It’s very realistic, very real world.”

“The mosaics are one more aspect of the art program (at the school),” says Amrine. “I think a continual thread is collaborative, studio. It’s really a beautiful example of ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’ Because it’s all little tiny pieces that can be beautiful in their own way, but they don’t mean anything, and they don’t create an image until they all are assembled together in this very studio-like atmosphere. I think there’s something to that, the collaboration. Students develop the options, and there is an opportunity for spontaneity because although you have a general plan, you can be spontaneous in a big group like that. You are making your mark, but it’s in the service of a greater whole. Kind of like jazz, reflect your little portion from being inspired by somebody else’s, and looking and observing. But also, being able to talk about what you’re doing. Being social, kind of like some of the old quilting bees must have been, where you’re really working on something much greater than yourself. With those quilting pieces—unless it was a crazy quilt—there was usually a pretty set pattern. Same with the mosaics. There’s a template, there’s a drawing, but it really goes its own way, in real time, which has a little bit of a musical element to it.” 

The mosaics are much more than visual art projects. They also serve “…the connections we are trying to make across different subjects,“ says Amrine. “Where does this bring something alive that’s in physics or in history of art or in, straight up botany? Where is it bringing something alive in a new way? Because, of course, that’s part of the point. I guess you could call these mosaics an art project, but they are also an ecology project because we are looking to see where’s balance. And where does this influence that? Someone who can draw the Fibonacci sequence beautifully maybe inspires someone else to look outside and see the pattern in nature or discover that musical composition is actually based on the same proportions. That’s the kind of thinking that we’re trying to stimulate. It’s not just subject, close the book, next subject—but where do they influence each other?” 

Sometimes, as was the case in the spring of 2022, at first there was no clear consensus, many good ideas were proposed and there was a great deal of discussion. Eventually, Efimova asked Capraro to synthesize and refine the various images that the students had proposed, and he brought back, “A glorious, glorious sketch and students loved it,” says Efimova. It became the template for the final product.

The pandemic created a special challenge. The Italy trip was cancelled in 2020 and the school closed for in-person learning in the spring. But Efimova remembered that, “One of the students, as his personal project, had made a mosaic copy of the class photograph that was taken at the beginning of the school year. I asked the student to donate this, he agreed, and it became the centerpiece of their class gift. We made the border with the initials of each student. Each student received a small square and they came in the summer, two at a time, and made their own initials.”

Recently, another previous class gift also played an important pandemic-healing role. The class of 2018’s mosaic frames the entrance to the school’s new addition. It’s a freeform, almost improvised-appearing, yet beautifully balanced work, mostly in warm, welcoming shades of blue. Amrine recalls that in December 2021,” We were able to have (the annual) choir concert outside. It was the first choir concert we had had since Covid. The parents were there and other children, and alumni came, and the students sang with that mosaic as their backdrop. Elena said, ‘It’s almost as if it was made for this moment.’” 

The first mosaics and Italy trips began before the children who are in school now in 2022-2023, were even born. “Everybody who comes to our school, they know about it,” says Efimova. “They know that it’s kind of part of the curriculum. Yes, it’s part of the curriculum, but only in our school.” The Ann Arbor Steiner School is the only Waldorf School in the world with these traditions, which helps to make it a very special place to learn, indeed.

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