PS 939 Sunset School of Cultural Learning
Brooklyn, NY 2025

All of Us

This 40-foot long mural contains 7 graphs, which provide a snapshot of the PS939 community.

Consider Community Concept: Our independent actions move and shape our collective experience.

In the school cafeteria, a mother is kneeling on the floor next to her daughter, paintbrush in hand, helping her reach a corner of the mural. Across the room, a grandfather and his granddaughter sit at a table with colored pencils, choosing colors for the school's sun-shape logo animation. At the green screen, an uncle and his nephew are filming and recording into the microphone.

This is what the family engagement project at P.S. 939 looks like across three workshops in Spring 2025. The Painted Cloud worked with the administration at the Sunset School of Cultural Learning in Sunset Park - a K-4 school where the four predominant home languages are English, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese.

Some families came to the workshops and made the work alongside their young artists. Others participated through the Family Questionnaire from home, in any preferred language, on their own time. The Family Questionnaire was translated into Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese so families could answer in the four predominant home languages, and it let families take part without needing to come in person.

We asked six questions: What color is the building where you live? What is a food you enjoy with your family? What is one place in New York you and your family like to play and relax? What is one thing you notice on the way to school? Which languages do you speak at home? What is a term of endearment your family says?

What the families brought back came in English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Albanian, Cantonese, Urdu, and Bengali - eight languages. Their answers became the material for the song, the mural, and the graphs.

We designed the workshops with stations, with multilingual signage at each one so families could read the activities and choose where to be. Some went straight to the mural floor. Others colored logo frames at tables and still others moved and grooved to the music at the green screen. Many families opted to cycle through more than one activity.

Families came in not always looking like they planned to paint. Caregivers walked in still in their work clothes, with younger siblings on their hips, carrying things from the day. Then a parent would pick up a brush to help their kid reach a spot on the mural, and then they were painting too. By the end of the workshop their hands had paint on them.

The song "All of Us" came from the traits the caregivers shared. Sixty-plus words describing their children - fierce, amables, 坚强, مُتعاونون, lovable, 温柔, inteligentes, مُضحِكون - became the body of a Looping Musical Vignette (LMV) - a community-made song and moving image, one continuous musical movement designed to loop seamlessly. The refrain returns each time on all of us / todos nosotros / كُلّنا / 我们所有人.

In small-group recording sessions, young artists from the upper grades sang the words. One young artist came down from class to sing the Arabic words. Usually her Arabic stays at home and the school day is in English or Spanish. This time the song needed her voice in a language her family speaks, and she sang.

The video pairs the young artists moving on green screen with the mural behind them, their recorded voices laid over the footage. It's a catchy song loop made for playing the positive vibes of positive traits on repeat. The school and The Painted Cloud shared the finished track on Spotify and Bandcamp for families to enjoy and pass on to extended family, neighbors, and friends.

The mural stretches forty feet across the main hallway. Marks and colors from every person who painted are there. Each session added a layer. The first group painted color mixes in wet strokes across the surface. Between sessions, geometric tape designs went down with the graphs from the Family Questionnaire painted into the same wall. The next group painted over the tape. When the tape came off at the end, every layer underneath stayed visible.

Across the mural, the trait words appear in four scripts on the same colored ground - Sweet Dulces 温暖的 لطيفون on one line, Sincere Sinceros 真诚的 صادقون on the next.

Each family hand-colored three frames of the P.S. 939 sun-shape logo with colored pencils at the workshop tables. The frames were scanned and animated frame by frame - the same sun, different colors and styles by every family who added one.

The six graphs from the Family Questionnaire became a visual record - the colors of buildings, the foods, the New York places, what the young artists notice on the way to school, the languages spoken at home, and the terms of endearment.

This portrait - the mural, the song, the logo, the graphs - is the community of P.S. 939 in Spring 2025, made by the families and young artists who are the community.

Our independent actions move and shape our collective experience.

Made in partnership with P.S. 939 Sunset School of Cultural Learning in Brooklyn, with the support of a family engagement grant.

Project team: Lead teaching artists Sarah Conarro and Julian Bozeman; with Margot Steadman, Ramón Steadman, Maddie Brienza, Kyou Shibata, and Saia Hilbertz. Annie Yuan Zhuang (Chinese translation), Farah Barqawi (Arabic translation), Laura Rivera Ayala (Spanish translation).