In May 2019, One Blue Sky, a street art project founded and funded by The Good Works Foundation in partnership with aptARTS, celebrated the completion of its first global endeavor. This year, in September 2020, the organization celebrated an important milestone in the completion of its second endeavor, with a new mural painted by Jonathan Darby in Inhamabne, Mozambique.
One Blue Sky’s website explains that it “is a street art project that aims to instill within children a shared humanity.” The project makes bounds in this direction by connecting two classrooms across oceans. Students in one nation study the same topic as their peers in another foreign nation. These children, hailing from disparate cultures and backgrounds, then “develop a pen pal like relationship, sending videos and pictures to each other across the globe to share their ideas about culture, friendship and kindness.” Through this communication, the classrooms “then work collectively to design a two-part mural concept which depicts their discoveries, with one section of the mural painted in each of two communities.”
In doing so, the organization explains, “The focus is to show the positive commonalities that both groups share, simply because they are children.” Their website continues, “While there are many things that make people different, there are far greater things that make human beings the same. Regardless of where a person comes from, everyone laughs, cries, imagines, and hopes. The collaborative artwork will foster unlikely friendships and represents the connection between two groups of children who may have markedly different life experiences, but ultimately live under One Blue Sky.”
Where One Blue Sky’s first edition connected students in the northeastern United States to students in Iraq, this second edition bridges the gap between one classroom in Vancouver, Canada and another in Inhamabne, Mozambique. In order “To help build awareness of both human impact on the environment and the connectedness of all human behavior,” both groups shared “videos and artworks about themselves, their way of life and their natural worlds.”
One Blue Sky’s current project, titled “CURRENT CONVERSATIONS” uses the project’s unique format to explore environmental conservation. “Through workshops, two coastal communities,16,000 kilometers apart explore animal migration, ocean currents and the connectedness of all living beings,” a release from the organization explains. “As the students learn the importance of marine animals, they create artworks to reflect and inspire change.”
Following the cross-cultural exchange, artist Jonathan Darby collaborated with the students in Mozambique to create “a massive mural to inform and instigate change within the individual and the world at large.” Darby is a London-based fine artist who graduated from the esteemed Central Saint Martins despite “being expelled from the Steiner school and having no A-level qualifications,” according to his biography on Saatchi Art. The work that he created with the youths in Mozambique features an energetic sea wave rife with marine life swirling around a child’s fresh face. This creative direction emphasizes the best of Darby’s work, which focuses on nuanced, impressionistic portraiture. The children added their own touch, helping to paint more fish around all four walls of the building this mural encompasses. One Blue Sky states that “This mural was painted with the hope that future generations can foster better relationships with their shared natural world and with each other.” It is instead to stand in the community for the foreseeable future as a reminder of the project’s lessons and a gorgeous point of community pride.
It feels like every life lesson has been hit in 2020: from the importance of cross-cultural exposure at a young age in reducing racial biases to the positive effects this Earth gleaned from industry’s slowing during shutdown. As the world turned to digital mediums for connection during isolation, one point from One Blue Sky hits especially hard: “Technological advancements allow humans across the planet to connect at an unprecedented rate. While human connectivity has increased in the modern era, human connection with the natural world has not. From the bees in the backyard to the fisherman existing thousands of kilometers away, all living beings impact one another.” Every living thing relies upon the others. There is no choice but harmony.
One Blue Sky offered their special thanks “to marine conservationist, Dr. Jess Williams and teachers Tionilda Carlos Chume, Ann Orlowska and Jenny Hughes for all their efforts. Merci to Dune de Dovela for facilitating!” Keep your eyes peeled for the second installment of this series, which will be Darby’s work with the children of Vancouver, Canada, who also participated in CURRENT CONVERSATIONS.
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