It may seem like a simple question: What does peace look like?
But the answers can be profoundly different depending on who is asked.
“Everybody’s not fighting. Everybody's okay. And everybody is chill with each other,” is how 15-year-old Ka’Tavion Coleman of Malvern, Ohio, describes it.
“I think peace means no wars, no conflict. It's nice out. It's a calm environment. There's no chaos going around. That's what I think peace is,” said Chase Jackson, 18, of Navarre, Ohio.
For 19-year-old Ella Mayton of Canton, Ohio, peace takes the form of a cat: soft, fluffy, furry and cuddly.
The concept of what peace looks like is something that Molly Merryman, Ph.D., has been mulling over for some time. An associate professor in Kent State University’s School of Peace and Conflict Studies, Merryman told Kent State Today that it’s a topic she revisits often.
“I’ve been very interested in thinking about `What does peace look like?’,” Merryman said. “It really has been this thing that I keep coming back to in my teaching and in my research. I think we really struggle to be a peaceful society because we don’t know what peace looks like, and yet, we can visualize war. We can visualize a lot of things, but I don’t think that as Americans, we do a very good job of visualizing peace.”
Idea for mural
Picturing peace was also important to Merryman for a much more tangible reason. There is a large blank wall in the newly renovated offices of the School of Peace and Conflict Studies in McGilvrey Hall that has been crying out for some artwork.
Merryman, who teaches courses in the school’s newly developed master’s degree program, felt that filling the wall might be the perfect project for her graduate students, who, as part of their peace education course, are tasked with developing curriculum and projects that will help them teach peace.
When Merryman went looking for an artist to help bring the concept alive, she turned to Vicki Boatright, who creates under the name BZTAT, and maintains a studio and gallery in downtown Canton, Ohio. Merryman was familiar with Boatright’s work and reached out to collaborate.
“I knew Vicki through the work that she had done. Her gallery’s been a favorite of mine,” Merryman said. “Over the years, I’ve gotten to know her and the work she has done, particularly with young people and young artists.”
For many years, Boatright had worked as a professional counselor before retiring to focus on her art full time.
Working with students
“I really missed working with individuals who were struggling in one way or another,” she said. Eventually, Boatright connected with Art Possible, a nonprofit organization that works with the Ohio Arts Council and the Ohio Department of Education. The program provides grants for schools to use to bring in artists to work with students who have a wide range of learning or behavioral challenges.
Boatright has been working with a group of students who attend high school at the Stark County Educational Service Center (SCESC), located at the RG Drage Career Center in Massillon, Ohio, who have developmental disabilities or mental health issues, some of which have been brought on by trauma.
“Last year we did a project where we created a mural that was all about what it’s like to be different, and it was a pretty amazing thing,” she said. “So, when Molly came to me and said, 'Could we do something to collaborate with you?' I said we should collaborate with the students, too.”
The students from the class, including Coleman, Jackson and Mayton, were ripe for discussions on peace, Boatright added.
“They know trauma. They know conflict,” she said, “They’ve lived a lot of stuff that most kids don’t live. They really are insightful and have more to offer. They are thinking of the big issues in life.”
That includes 14-year-old Carston Brumfield, of Creston, Ohio, who spent time working on an acrostic poem of PEACE for inspiration for the mural: Protest, Exists, Anger, Community and Equality.
“Community is uniting,” he said. And protest, he noted, is somewhere “in between peace and good.” Sometimes, Brumfield theorized, one must protest and create a little chaos to achieve peace.
Shared trauma
Two of Merryman’s graduate students working on the mural project also have seen their share of trauma. Alfred Zoeringre is from Burkina Faso, a West African nation marked by decades of political unrest, famine and corruption, and Damas Mpamo is a native of Rwanda, the East African nation which, during its 1994 civil war, suffered one of the worst genocides in all of history.
Mpamo said it’s easy to think of war zones when thinking about conflict, but conflict abounds in our everyday existence.
“We think about conflict as happening somewhere, but in our daily life, we experience that,” he said. “People are living with conflict and that impacts them in one way or another.”
The collaborative nature of the art project, Mpamo said, has forced the teachers and the students to work together and talk openly about their feelings about peace. “It’s what we should be doing even in normal life – we should be doing things together and then see what comes up.”
Merryman said working with the students has been a profound experience for her graduate students, “I think it really opened their eyes to the fact that in America, there is also trauma, there’s violence, there are many things to overcome.”
“There’s that sense of shared trauma,” she continued, “And when I think of what differentiates our peace studies program from others is that ours was formed specifically out of trauma and devastation and has taken that and turned it into a learning opportunity.”
May 4 Legacy
Kent State’s Center for Peaceful Change, which evolved into the School of Peace and Conflict Studies, was created as the university’s response to the May 4, 1970, shootings when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the escalation of the Vietnam War, killing four and wounding nine others. The school exists to be a living memorial to the slain students.
Zoeringre said the project has been an effective way for the School of Peace and Conflict studies to extend itself into community engagement, so that the legacy of May 4 “can be transported out of the university.”
“As aspiring peace builders, we can be practical in engaging with communities and engaging with people from different backgrounds,” he said. “We have enriched our understanding of peace and the type of change that it can bring.”
The mural project began with the students taking a trip to the Kent Campus to tour the May 4 Visitors Center and learn about the shootings, so that they could have a deeper understanding of the history of the school where their artwork would be displayed.
Overcoming trauma through art
Jay Liedel, the intervention specialist from SCECS who teaches the class of budding artists, said the visit to the May 4 center made a lasting impression on the students.
“It was very powerful for them to see what happened at that time,” Liedel said, who earned a master’s degree in education administration leadership from Kent State in 2016. “To be able to be there and explain what happened on that ground years ago, I think it was very powerful for them. And we had many great discussions about what happened.”
Liedel’s students come from a variety of backgrounds and have not been able to perform well in traditional classroom settings. He and Boatright have worked together for several years on various projects, and he has seen how art has helped to transform his students.
“What I've learned from my students is that they can do many more things than people would expect,” he said, “I think you can see they do some amazing things.”
The peace mural project seemed to resonate profoundly with the class, Liedel said.
“Many of them come from places of trauma and crisis. So, to be able to have a forum for discussing those things openly, it's been great for my students to work through some of their own personal issues and create some amazing pieces of art along the way,” he said. “What I've been surprised about is they all think about this in a little different way.”
Learning peace
The discussion, Liedel said, has been about peace in a larger sense, such as war, but also about personal relationships with family, teachers and classmates.
“I think that it's been really important to see them bring the big concepts of peace into their own day-to-day lives,” he said. “We talk about basic things like getting along, but we also talk about having to take action to make peace. So, when you have a conflict, it's not going to go away unless you take some action steps. And that's been powerful because these students have struggled in school with their behavior. So now we can apply that to their own life and their own history and say, hey, it takes work to end conflict and to actually achieve peace.”
The concept of peace as an ongoing process, Merryman added, is what the school’s teachings are all about.
“Peace isn't something you achieve and walk away from,” she said. “It is about always working towards peacebuilding, always working towards finding those relationships. And to me, that's the other thing that's really exciting about this mural – it speaks to really important peace-building work that was happening in the community.”
Creating lasting peace
Working on the mural and learning about May 4 has given Chase Jackson much to think about on the topic of peace.
“Even if something bad happens, it can still result in peace,” he said. “If there’s a horrible tragedy, people will learn from that and then they'll be more aware of how the community is.”
But even as Jackson created art intended to help others visualize peace, he expressed deep concerns about whether the concept was attainable.
“It makes me think about will there ever be true, fully peace in the world, because it's not really going to be possible,” he said. “But it can be possible. But it's very hard.”
The finished mural will be unveiled at 11 a.m. on May 1 in the Center for Philanthropy and Alumni Engagement, Room 103, across the street from McGilvrey Hall. Due to space constraints inside McGilvrey, the unveiling will be via live stream. Following the presentation, guests are encouraged to stop by McGilvrey to view the mural in person. The mural project is part of the May 4 Education Committee programming and is part of the events leading up to the university’s 55th Commemoration of the May 4, 1970, shootings.
Additional photos by Vicki Boatright, BZTAT Studio.