GREAT BARRINGTON — At first glance, it seems like an unusual sight. Scores of young middle- and high-school art students, mostly from the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, gather on the week before Halloween to paint autumn-themed watercolors and hang them on windows of participating merchants on Main and Railroad streets. It turns out it’s not so unusual; it’s been going on for more than 70 years.
Monument Mountain Regional High School art teacher Neel Webber said the origins of the tradition had always been something of a mystery, but he recently exchanged emails with local artist Eunice Agar, who told him the tradition began in 1949 when she was a student at the former Searles High School on Bridge Street.
“She told me the most definitive timeline,” Webber said in a brief interview on Railroad Street. “She participated in it … she even knew the name of the teacher. It’s the first time anyone has been that definitive.”
The decades-old tradition was mostly suspended last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Du Bois Middle School students did not participate because field trips were prohibited at the time. The high school artists painted at the school and brought their work downtown to hang in the windows at a later time.
This year, students arrived on Friday, Oct. 22, before lunch and began preparing their supplies and taping paper to the windows, starting at Carr Hardware (one of the sponsors) and stretching to Railroad Street on both sides of Main. Also sponsoring was the Rotary Club of Great Barrington.
“We arrange in advance with the store owners who want to participate, then all the paper is custom cut for the windows,” said Webber, who has played a role in organizing the event for all of his 27 years at Monument. “We label them all.”
Then they engaged in tempera mural painting, which provided an artistic challenge to recreate in the space of a few hours a well-done mural-size work from each student’s original 18-by-24-inch design. Teachers say the point of the day is to give students an opportunity to feel a part of the community and to make a contribution.
“It is competitive because most of the art classes submitted designs, with roughly 160 submissions and we only chose 52 this year,” Webber explained. “It all depends on how many windows and how many kids we can fit in the bus.”
Katie Malone-Smith, an art teacher at Du Bois Middle School, has been leading middle school students downtown on a Friday in October since she began teaching at the school in 2009.
“Middle school kids are in their young teen years, so this gives them a measure of independence,” Malone-Smith said. “It’s almost like a right of passage for these 7th- and 8th-graders because they’re going to become high school students soon, so it’s a really big deal.”
“It’s not a bad way to spend a day,” Webber added. “It’s a wonderful field trip and such a great community event. People come downtown, sometimes during their lunch hour from work. People get to see that the high school kids are really creative and they get acknowledged publicly.”
It also gives students a chance to casually interact in a positive manner with adults and the store owners who help the students throughout the day with water, bathroom access, food, and encouragement. This year’s winners are listed below.
2021 Halloween Window Painting Contest Winners
Grand Prize Winner: Raeah Rama, 12th grade, Monument Mountain, Location: Fuel
Monument Mountain Winners
1st Prize: Ruby Smith, 12th grade, Location: Bernay Fine Art
2nd Prize: Kuchina Lucinda, 9th grade, Location Barrington Outfitters
3rd Prize: Rowan Boyer, 11th grade, Location: Bernay Fine Art
Honorable Mention: Quimby Del Signore, 12th grade, Location: RR Street Artists Collective
Honorable Mention: Sarah Cull, 12th grade, Location: Marjoram & Roux
New Category — Best Humor: Iris Firth, 9th grade, Location: JWS Art Supplies
Monument Valley Middle School Winners
1st Prize: Leilana Salvini and Francesca Stanmeyer
2nd Prize: Ash Hallock and Emma Seward
3rd Prize: Caroline Becker and Logan Hartell
