Middle school students in Saint John, New Brunswick, have created a towering mosaic portrait of Andrea Simon, a residential school and Sixties Scoop survivor, assembling it from 10,890 cardboard squares. The installation was made to honor the Indigenous elder and the story she carries, turning a classroom project into a large tribute that drew attention well beyond the school.
The scale of the work was striking. The students laid down 110 rows of 99 squares each, a grid of 10,890 pieces that stretched roughly 50 feet wide and 60 feet high once it was fully assembled. Building something that size meant treating thousands of small cardboard tiles as a single, carefully ordered image rather than a loose collection of parts.
The portrait was built like a coded puzzle. Each color stood for a letter, and every student was responsible for a single row, placing their squares so the colors would line up in the correct order across the whole piece. Only when each row was set down accurately did the full likeness of Elder Andrea Simon come into view for the people working on it.
Those involved described the project as a lesson in collective effort as much as art. When everybody does their part, all of those little bits can add up to something that is quite impactful, one person said. Another spoke about the source image itself, calling the photograph the pattern was based on a gorgeous representation of empowerment and beauty.
Andrea Simon herself was able to meet the students over Zoom ahead of the unveiling. When she spoke about her experience at residential school, the room fell completely silent, a moment that underscored the weight of the history the students were working to memorialize. For many of them, it connected the cardboard squares in front of them to a real life and a difficult past.
Simon was not able to attend installation day in person. To make sure she could still take part, the students livestreamed the entire event, allowing her to follow the setup process as it happened from a distance. She later said she was very pleased with the result, having watched her portrait come together piece by piece on screen.
The finished mosaic stands as both an artwork and a tribute, a portrait of a survivor built one small square at a time by a class of young students. By dividing the labor row by row and trusting each classmate to place their part correctly, they turned thousands of ordinary cardboard pieces into a single, deliberate image of Elder Andrea Simon.