BREATHE WITH ME

Henry M. Gunn High School
Palo Alto, California
22 April, 2021 – 25 April, 2021

Breathe with Me at Gunn High School

For three days, starting on Earth Day, 22 April 2021, the Gunn High School community and residents from the neighboring Barron Park in Palo Alto, California, gathered to participate in Breathe With Me. 600 participants painted their breath on a 350-foot-long canvas on Gunn High School’s soccer field fence. The visual impact of 600 linked “breaths” was profound. Breathe with Me gave to the community:

an opportunity for students who have been apart for many months to gather together with the school teachers, parents, staff, neighbors and passersby to create a large-scale public art installation; an appreciation for life and the simple universal action of breathing, no matter what difficult challenges we may each be facing during the pandemic; a reminder that we are all connected to one another—as a neighborhood, school, city and worldwide community.

For the next five weeks, the canvases provided a backdrop for a variety of music, dance, and poetry readings, performed in the park by and for Palo Alto and Stanford residents.

[After the work was de-installed], advanced art students from Gunn used several painted canvases to create their own works on top of the blue stripes. Some of the panels will travel to Palo Alto sister cities around the world, and others are decorating the walls of the Gunn High School Wellness Center, Language Department and yoga room.

– Svetlana Gous, organizer of Breathe with Me, Palo Alto (edited for brevity)

Breathe with Me at Gunn High School — Breathe with Me installed at Gunn High School, Palo Alto, CA
Image: Paige K. Parsons

Art can be very powerful…over this last year we had to breathe through these [masks]. It feels like we are turning a corner. I felt a lot of joy to be here and to share this with everybody.

Tom DuBois, Mayor of Palo Alto

A sense of community is what has sustained us. This is a culminating event where after a year [of the pandemic], we have learned how important we are to each other. We [aim to] graduate students from our school that become citizens of the world, that see themselves as part of the ownership of the planet.

Wendy Stratton, Principal of Gunn High School

How do cultures fit together, how do people fit together? Any way we can get together and do something that unifies us, I want to be a part of that.

Liz Matchett, Gunn High School World Language Instructional Leader

I see the painting as a social contract. The first line, for me, is signing a contract for your own wellness and self care … and the second line is about understanding and supporting the environment that you are in locally, and then globally.

Svetlana Gous, project organizer

I really hope this helps us start to recover from the chaos of the pandemic. It’s been so hard for so many people, and I hope it’s a nice step forward…helping our community and focusing our efforts on what really matters.

Cate Rose, student volunteer, Palo Alto, California

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