Art club initiates project of painting VTA benches

Alexa Gross (10) and Shreya Basu (12) work on the bench. They collaborate in continuing on what had been painted before.

The Art Club started a project of painting the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) benches outside of Shah Hall during long lunch today.

Three sophomores, Alexa Gross, Marti Sutton and Bill Liang proposed designs to the VTA system, which finalized and approved specific ones for the project. The sophomores worked with middle school art teacher Elizabeth Saltos to create the initial designs for the benches.

Upper School art teacher Pilar Aguero-Esparza both supervises and participates in this project.

“The art club is now implementing, or executing these designs that were proposed by some of our Harker students.” she said.

Alexa Gross (10) worked on a design, which had hands spell out “community” in sign language, today.

“Basically when we came up with these designs, they were done just as general ideas so this is an opportunity to go into more detail and get a chance to see our designs a reality,” Alexa said.

Shreya Basu (12) helped paint the benches.

“It’s really cool that Harker gets to participate in an art project that expands beyond just the school community, and we get to showcase some of the talented artists’ works on the benches for the public to see,” she said. “They’re revamping their old designs and we had some art club meetings where we discussed some ideas for the benches.”

The art club will continue working on this project every long lunch on Wednesday until it is completed.