High school art students visualize perseverance

The large, graceful structure dominates the airspace of Shadle Park High School’s common area. It starts at a desk covered in textbooks, as if a student is studying. It then arcs gracefully upward, the books morphing into geometric shapes and then, finally, birds in flight.

Over the past three months, about 90 Shadle Park High School students have worked on the hanging art installation that visualizes perseverance, said art teacher Carrie Stroud. The papier-mache installation is 52 feet long, 20 feet at its widest and hangs roughly 20 feet above the floor.

“Teachers and students are working harder than they have ever had to work before,” Stroud said, adding that perseverance has been a schoolwide theme for the past two years.

Stroud said she came up with the visualization after listening to student input. The installation was hung on Feb. 8 and will remain up for another week or two, she said.

“I got the idea from the drawings they generated,” she said. “They inspired the idea, and then they slowly changed the idea.”

The birds are built out of papier-mache using student notes and assignments, said senior Madelyn Kolterman, 18.

Kolterman, who hopes to study aerospace engineering, designed and built one of the largest birds, which is at the peak of the installation. The bird, which has a wooden interior frame, took about four months to create, she said.

Kolterman’s bird, along with other students’ work, is held up by a large, hanging metal framework. The Shadle Park materials processing class built the 325-pound metal support.

“The big thing is just working in teams and collaborating with the art department,” said Tony Anselmo, material processing teacher. “It’s a real-world problem.”

The art department sent Anselmo’s students their concept. It was then up to his students to actualize their vision. One challenge the students faced was how to measure the space accurately, because they didn’t have access to the rafters. One student suggested throwing tennis balls, with strings attached, over the ceiling rafters, which is what they ended up doing, Anselmo said.

The 90 students who worked on the project came from four separate classes.

“Well, it was organized chaos,” Stroud said. “We had a lot of moving parts.”

Students found plenty of crossover between the art project and what they hope to study in college. Junior Mark Powell, 16, wants to study computer programming. Early on in the project he noticed there were a lot of square pyramids, which he said looked too rigid. He took it upon himself to design small, more organically shaped pieces.

He said this reminded him of designing computer code, where the smallest bits can – and do – drastically affect the overall outcome.

Senior Phillip Flexer, 18, worked on the support structure. He said one of the biggest challenges was flexing in the structure. This was solved by adding more cross sections. Flexer plans to study mechanical engineering at the University of Idaho.

“We started taking a lot of pride in it,” said freshman Tyler Frederickson, 14. “We were really thoughtful.”

Frederickson wants to be an aerospace engineer. He designed some of the birds, allowing him to apply his knowledge of aerospace design.

“I worked with the idea that we could make it look like it could fly,” he said.

Stroud said when they first installed the piece they worried student traffic in the common area would damage the work.

“The students have been wonderful; they haven’t touched it,” she said.

The biggest benefit of the project, Stroud said, is that students are able to integrate knowledge from different classes.

“Career and technical education classes and art classes provide that transfer of knowledge that students need to really make their learning relevant,” she said. “It’s wonderful that our district supports these programs.”