Standing squarely in the middle of NE Washington, D.C., Kelly Miller Middle School used to blend into the surrounding buildings and houses. After receiving a long overdue art overhaul from the award-winning artist Brandon Hill, however, the school — and its students — have been given renewed attention. With new murals exploding with color facing outward to passersby and inward to those walking the halls, Hill hopes to bring a new sense of power to the Kelly Miller community.
Kelly Miller welcomes around 350 students from the surrounding neighborhoods each school year, including Lincoln Heights, Hillbrook and Fairmount Heights. Hill began multiple interior and exterior projects in June, focusing less on creating traditional school artwork and more on boosting the self esteem of Kelly Miller students and staff.
“I said, ‘Okay, how do I help best accentuate the feeling of leadership with a feeling of going here,’” Hill said. “If they’re verbally hearing some of the stuff, how to reinforce it visually.”
The mural projects began with a pro-bono piece in Kelly Miller’s cafeteria. After the success of the cafeteria piece, Kelly Miller administrators approached Hill with a fleshed-out budget for the remaining walls.
Walking through the halls of the school, this focus on positive impact is evident. Phrases like “The Pride of The City” and “SuperSix” adorn walls, brandishing anthemic messages in Hill’s bold and colorful style.
“I started designing for kids and then I turned that crap off, and I said, wait, they’re not kids. They are way further, way more advanced than they’re given credit for,” Hill said. “I just started sort of kind of thinking about if a cool restaurant, or if University of Maryland, if they asked me to do this.”
The Creative Process
Hill said his vision for the school’s many murals centered on the school’s iconography, slogans and main ideals.
“I wanted to be an absurd amount of redundancy in the messaging of being a kid, knowing Kelly Miller, having the pride in yourself just muscle memory,” Hill said. “You know what you’re about, what I’m here for, classmates are here for.”
Hill continued, adding that he wanted students to feel pride in where they went to school the same way adults feel pride about organizations they belong to.
“I thought about that as individual pride. School pride, individual pride … if this was a university, it (would be) the fraternities, right?” Hill said. “Or if it’s the military; now you’re a Navy Seal, or these are the soldiers, this is the army. I just thought about it like that.”
The hope behind this revitalization and support of Kelly Miller through art is to not only encourage kids to try in school, but also to bring attention to the school’s issues with funding.
“The idea is to kind of beautify the school, get kids pumped about education and just like maybe enjoy the environment that they’re in hopefully, maybe pull some inspiration from that. Ward seven and eight schools are super underfunded, ward seven more specifically,” Campagna said.
Overall, Hill hopes kids can find joy in both their school and themselves, creating a new academic and social environment.
“You go through this threshold, and now you’re an individual now you’re in eighth grade, right?” Hill said. “Yeah, I’m special now. I’m in eighth grade. I was in Kelly Miller. We were in Kelly; we all go to the cafeteria but like now I’m in eighth grade, or now I’m a sixth grader. Now I’m going to celebrate like this. I worked so hard to get to this level, to just grow up.”
Contextualizing Kelly Miller
Hill’s artwork is incredibly needed for Kelly Miller. In the post No Child Left Behind era, President George W. Bush’s long-criticized educational policy which penalized schools for not improving test scores, the school has struggled to bounce back. According to state tests scores, 14% of students are proficient in reading, and just 2% are proficient in math.
Kelly Miller’s 2023-24 academic year gave the school a budget of $7.1 million, a decrease of almost $375,000 from the previous year (not including central allocation expenditures).
Compared to surrounding schools with similar enrollments, this decrease is troubling. Hart Middle School, a ward eight school with a projected enrollment of 356, had a 2023-24 budget of $8.1 million. MacFarland Middle School, located in ward four with an enrollment size of 500 students, submitted a budget of over $11 million for the 2025 fiscal year.
Understanding the surrounding area is important to grasp the full view of Kelly Miller and the necessity of Hill’s community-focused art. According to U.S. Census data, median household income in Lincoln Heights is between $40,000-50,000, well below the national median of over $80,000. Despite this, the median home value is over $400,000, and median rent costs $1,400, a $200 increase from the national median.
Burdened by high housing costs and stagnant wages, as well as gun violence and crime, Lincoln Heights (one of the neighborhoods with highest population of Black people in D.C.) has suffered as a result of government negligence and systemic inequality.
“It was right before the pandemic … I don’t think there were any full time librarians for any of the schools in Ward seven or Ward eight,” Katherine Campagna, a D.C.-based artist collaborating with Hill in Kelly Miller, said. “It’s a little insane. It’s like, how do you expect these kids to compete with everybody else when they don’t have the same tools as everybody else?”
The art from Hill and fellow D.C.-based artists like Campagna have worked to bring a new sense of belonging to some of the youngest residents of Lincoln Heights, encouraging a fresh state of being.
“The idea is to kind of beautify the school, get kids pumped about education and just like maybe enjoy the environment that they’re in hopefully, maybe pull some inspiration from that,” Campagna said.
One of Hill’s main goals with the exterior mural was to show students someone to model themselves after, creating a highly colorful portrait of the school’s namesake: scientist, mathematician and sociologist Kelly Miller.
“Kelly Miller is just an abstract name to (the students),” Hill said. Kelly Miller’s a scientist, a mathematician. He’s a real person. So let’s make this mural that’s the product, the pride of your school mural, but for anyone that’s driving by and may not come in, is the — I don’t wanna call it the advertisement — it’s like, this is what we’re about.”
Hill’s Career So Far
Hill has been a professional artist for over 12 years now, creating different pieces across mediums for a wide variety of clients. His portfolio includes pieces for multimillion dollar companies like Nike, but he always knew he wanted to come back to smaller, community-based projects.
Hill previously worked with the art collective No Kings, where he established his biggest steps as a career artist. However, he described not being able to connect with the projects he was doing on a personal level, saying he needed something more meaningful.
“Public art, unlike music, the higher you get the less accessible you become,” Hill said. A musician can be a bazillionaire but it means that your individual music is being put in formats that are easy to consume … art’s kind of like the exact opposite. The bigger you become, your supply gets shortened or your price goes up, and whether it’s you or through management, it just happens.”
Citing this lack of connection, Hill knew something had to change. No longer working for No Kings, he decided to shift his attention to projects like his art at Kelly Miller.
“This upcoming year, I kind of made a change and I was just like, ‘Look, I’m gonna prioritize these types of projects, and just see how to figure out how to get them done,’” Hill said.
For some, it might seem like a fall from grace to go from working with global athletic brands to painting slogans on a middle school’s walls. However, Hill has felt connected to Kelly Miller since his first project with the school’s staff; his mom was also a teacher, giving him more of a reason to come back.
“When I came in, I kind of got to know people and I’m like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of the school I went to,’” Hill said. “It just felt more neighborly.”