The White Shirt Project 2025

The White Shirt Project, created by Dawn Southworth almost thirty years ago and specific to GUS, asks students to become more culturally literate while also thinking about who they are, where they are, and where they are going, core themes of a GUS education.

Here, art is central not only to the 8th grade student experience but to understanding across disciplines, and it embodies something Edward Clapp, Principal Investigator at Harvard’s Project Zero calls participatory creativity. At GUS, no one is creative or not creative, we all participate in the act of creativity. That invitation, for everyone to engage, is the heart of what we do, and it reminds me of the late filmmaker David Lynch’s craft observation that, “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” 

Students come here as small fish, and as they grow bigger, they are asked to dig deeper bit by bit, inch by inch, until 8th grade, when they head to New York City to swim alongside all that is big and interesting and maybe abstract too, so they can return home and plan, research, write, and make art utilizing skills from years of a GUS education. Edward Clapp’s suggestion, that art and creativity should be an invitation, is clear in this exhibition, expertly curated by Ms. Southworth with the help of parents. It is also evident in the student’s writing, influenced not just by each other but by the talks given in years past too. In David Lynch’s meditations on creativity, he states, “If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.” The Class of 2025 has worked far more than four hours to create their White Shirt Projects, which are both individual examples of participatory creativity and possibility as well as an insightful portrait of the class of 2025, from whom I have also learned so much.