On Friday, Adams Elementary School students helped cut the ribbon for a vibrant blue mural teeming with cartoon sea creatures and dotted with the old names of more than 100 Chumash villages along the Central California coastline. It was unveiled just in time for World Oceans Day on June 8, which, like the mural, was created to celebrate Earth’s lifeline: the ocean.
Painted by veteran muralist and environmental activist Emiliano Campobello, the “Ocean Guardians in Chumash Territory” mural was born out of a 30-year partnership between the Rotary Club and Adams Elementary, with support from the Children’s Creative Project, a nonprofit of the Santa Barbara County Education Office.
Campobello and company began planning the mural in May 2024, selecting the 9′ x 39′ wall on the exterior of the Adams art building.
Meanwhile, students in art teacher Sara Leo’s class were doing their research. Over two weeks, every single one of Adams’s more than 500 students created their own Ocean Guardian artwork, based on one of the various native species that live in the Santa Barbara Channel.
Scattered across the mural’s painted waves are colorful native sea critters, from whales and great whites to seahorses and jellyfish, all from the creative minds and hands of students.
Campobello coordinated with the existing Ocean Guardian Ambassadors program at the school (an initiative by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA) to encourage ocean stewardship and education through the arts. The mural was also part of a joint project between Campobello and Claire Fackler, National Education Liaison for NOAA, to tie-off their time in the Community Environmental Council’s Climate Stewards certification course.
Fackler provided marine habitat educational materials to add an educational aspect to the project. “We are always looking for ways to bring the ocean into the classroom,” she said.
Campobello calls the mural project “artivism” to “help build awareness about our role as stewards of our environments while empowering the children with a perspective of belongingness, and that all of Life is interconnected.”
Including every student was important to Campobello to create a sense of community, saying their artworks are “like the children who made them: each different, each unique, each a beautiful creation.”
In the mural, he included more than 100 indigenous Chumash villages with their old names and locations on his painted coastal mainland and the Channel Islands to show “how populated this special place was.” To do this, he consulted with Chumash elders, academics, and existing maps to re-create the land’s topography and pinpoint the locations of ancient villages.
“With some artistic liberties in scale and perspective,” he said, he “strove to create a map of these lands, as it was populated before the arrival of colonizers.”
He said the project is his way of showing respect for the land and honoring the Chumash people who “have always cared for the lands and waters in harmony, recognizing their relatives all around us and in the Sacred Waters. This is a Land Acknowledgement, created together with the next generation of Climate Stewards and Ocean Guardians.”
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