Breathe With Me
On display April 22 - June 4, 2021, Gunn High School playing fields facing Bol Park
Local Partner and Project Producer: Svetlana Gous
Global Concept: Jeppe Hein & ART 2030
As part of the worldwide Breathe With Me initiative by artist Jeppe Hein and ART 2030, Svetlana Gous produced and curated the Palo Alto edition through the City’s ArtLift Microgrant Program and support from the Gunn High School PTA. All three of her children attended Gunn, making this project both a civic gesture and a deeply personal act of community care.
Over two days in April 2021, students, teachers, and residents gathered at Bol Park to “paint their breath” — a single vertical blue stroke on canvas— creating nearly 400 feet of canvas titled Community Breath. Installed along the Gunn High School fields, it became a collective exhale of connection after months of isolation. A community poem was curated and arranged by poet and physician Diana Farid, from words and phrases community participants recorded during their "Breathe with Me" Palo Alto experience.
During the following six weeks, the six-by-nine-foot panels were transformed rather than discarded, the project continued to foster creativity and wellbeing within the school community— serving as a backdrop for music performances, poetry readings, and aerial dance; as folded origami boats placed on local school campuses; and as foundations for new artworks by advanced art students, now on display in the school’s Wellness Center, World Language Center, and Yoga Room.
In 2025, Danish-American artist Lasse Antonsen began reimagining the canvases once more — tracing the story of our community that, through an act of breath, reawakened its sense of belonging. Filmmaker Steve Schecter’s short film and the Facebook community page preserve these moments, student articles described the event (1,2), while the global archive at breathewithme.world situates Gunn High School in Palo Alto within a shared international rhythm of breathing, painting, and remembering.
The students who painted those lines have since become citizens of the world.
Their breath lingers on the canvas — not as art preserved, but as life transformed.
Event organizer and producer: Svetlana Gous
Gunn High School Students: Katie Rueff, Wyatt Pedersen, Inga and Anton Gous, Maya Chang, Micaela Leong, Amy Suh, Ezra Furtado-Tiwari, Allan Jiang, Jonathan Yang
Gunn High School Teachers/Staff: Liz Matchett, Claudia Schroeppel, Diane Ichikawa, Rosie Castillo, Deanna Messinger, Christina Florea
Gunn HS Parents: Jen Schultz, Melissa Alpan, Carola Vasquez, Elisabeth Bonnet
Artists/Art Educators: Charissa Gering, Alan Chan, Stephanie Enos, Clare Stokolosa
Advisors: Martha Sakellariou, Nancy Howe