MBHS students address mental health with Kalopsi(ART)
To celebrate May as Mental Health Awareness Month, Mountain Brook High School students are sharing their interpretation of mental health through an inaugural community art event: Kalopsi(ART).
“This generation’s willingness to speak up and talk about mental health, it just blows me away,” MBHS photography teacher Becton Morgan said.
Kalopsi(ART) takes place at Avondale Brewing Company on Thursday, May 2, at 6 p.m. and showcases high school student artwork from Mountain Brook, Homewood and Vestavia Hills. The name of the event was chosen from the term “kalopsia,” which is derived from the Greek language and translates to “the delusion of things being more beautiful than they are.”
Shareta Collins, marketing director at Impact Family Counseling, said that the name speaks to the fact that mental health can be “an elusive illness.” While someone may appear to be fine on the outside, there may be a very different story on the inside.
“In light of this, mental health can be described as a ‘kalopsia’ force. We thought to put a positive spin on it and that’s how we came up with it,” she said.
Collins said the purpose of the event is to bring awareness to mental health and also help Impact Family Counseling continue to provide an affordable service to the community by raising funds.
Impact Family Counseling, which has a partnership with Homewood Schools, is a nonprofit agency that offers outpatient counseling through a sliding pay scale for individuals and families. Through their Successful Schools program, Collins said they go into the schools and provide behavior aid and counseling. They also provide anger management classes, healthy relationship workshops and other seminars for students and families.
“As a way to bridge the gap [between students and Impact Family Counseling], we decided to ask some of the art students to create this artwork by just showing us what they thought about mental health. To highlight their creations, we thought it would be a great idea to bring the Birmingham community into it,” Collins said.
Collins said the “one-of-a-kind” art pieces include traditional painting, sculptures, photographs and digital media. Each student also is sharing a statement to go with their piece, she added, to further explain their interpretation.
About 25 students in photography, sculpture and visual arts were chosen to participate, Becton said. The project was so meaningful and successful, she added, that they plan to do it annually.
MBHS senior Charlotte Winn, a student in AP photography, chose to create a digital montage and collage project fitted onto a canvas.
“I have a lot of family experience and personal experience of anxiety and depression and everything, and a big thing with that is a lot of times you can’t really tell when someone is struggling,” she said.
On her canvas, she has three pictures of a girl displaying three different types of happy emotions, with her eyes hidden by black blindfolds. The purpose of the blindfolds, Winn said, is to show that she can still look happy but be hiding parts of herself where she might be struggling with mental health. Winn also cut out magazine letters that read “Not all wounds are visible” and pasted them onto the piece, along with the photo she created, through a digital canvas transfer she learned from her photography class.
“It’s just pointing out that people have their own battles that they are fighting, and you can’t always judge things,” she said.
Another student, Jeffrey Schultz, chose to respond about mental health by combining his concentration with what he thought it felt like to have attention-deficit disorder. His acrylic painting shows a fantasy town with creature citizens walking around.
“My concentration is weird creatures and stuff in semi-normal settings. … There’s one [creature] that represents, like, attention deficit disorder, and they’re reaching everywhere, and they have a bunch of eyes and they’re trying to take in everything all at once,” Schultz said.
MBHS sculpture teacher Michael Dudley is having his students respond by creating a small hanging wall sculpture scene in nature that relates to their interpretation of mental health. He and MBHS art teacher Susie Davis said they were impressed by the detail and creativity his students put into their pieces. Other students even donated additional old art pieces to raise funds for the silent auction, along with their pieces they created in class.
“When you hear the word mental health, a lot of times it’s not talked about or it’s sometimes hushed,” Collins said. “I think creating that conversation with some of the students at an earlier age and creating that dialogue to have a discussion of what mental health is will essentially make it easier for them to have the conversation as they continue to grow older.”
Community members are invited to purchase a $25 ticket and take a look at the various interpretations. At the end of the night, they can further participate and raise funds for Impact Family Counseling by purchasing the art work through the silent auction. The ticket includes food catered by Hattie B’s Hot Chicken.
To purchase tickets or learn more about Impact Family Counseling, go to impactal.org.