Author: Tammy Lane • First Posted: Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Gallery (click any photo to view the gallery)

At Tates Creek Middle, students trace sections of their horse for templates, which they fill with geometric pieces of stained glass.

Brightly decorated horses are springing up all across the school district as Fayette County Public Schools students put on their creative thinking caps for a public art project.

“It’s a great way to show what we do here. It will represent our school really well,” said Virginia Smith, a fourth-grader at Clays Mill Elementary.

Art teacher have high praise for the collaborative, districtwide effort.

“I want them to see that something they make can be part of the community,” said Clays Mill art teacher Meg Selby, whose students are excited about the prospects.

“It’s going to be cool to see your artwork displayed where people can see it as they drive by,” said fourth-grader Ty Tommerup.

In Horse Play, each school submitted as many as four design proposals for a foal (elementary and middle) or a horse (high schools) in a standing or prancing pose. A community arts panel then selected one idea per school for the fiberglass sculpture collection.

A recent visit to two schools found the kids hard at work …

At Clays Mill Elementary

“Seahorse,” designed by fifth-grader Lacey Johnson, features an octopus, a sea turtle, tropical fish and eels twisting through seaweed on the foal’s legs.

“There’s been a few fixes for the squid,” Ty said. “If you mess up, you have to wait ’til it dries and repaint.”

The school’s art club has taken the lead, with members deciding on colors, shading and other specific elements. But painting their foal is definitely a group effort, with all ages contributing.

“We rarely have a project where we bring kindergarteners and fifth-graders together,” Selby said. “It’s been good for our whole school.”

Virginia, who likes to draw and experiment with colors, explained how the foal has evolved.

“Every week it has changed so much because so many people are working on it,” she said. “It has a little of everybody’s opinion in it, and everyone can do their own thing.”

At Tates Creek Middle

A mosaic proposal by sixth-grader Lauren Neal caught the judges’ attention.

“Stained glass will look better because of the 3-D. It’ll have more effect,” Lauren said while sketching tile shapes. “Different people have different designs. This one’s our horse.”

Her art teacher, Cory Bricking, estimated the kids would use three dozen colors to cover the foal in coin-size pieces of glass – a new medium for his students. He showed them how to trace a template on paper, such as the horse’s left ear, and then plot out geometric shapes to fill it in.

“We want to leave space so the glass tiles aren’t butted up against one another,” he told his after-school crew, explaining how grout lines would anchor the pieces and also accentuate the horse’s natural body lines and muscle structure.

“It’s a good teaching tool since they can see the progress as it goes along,” said Bricking, who supervises the glass-cutting step.

Tackling a three-dimensional sculpture in the round is a bonus challenge for these older kids, who mounted their foal on a wooden base to raise it to eye level.

“It’s something a little different,” said seventh-grader Claire Seebold. “I’ll feel good knowing I helped put it together.”

The big picture

Horse Play for Arts Education is a spinoff of a popular Horse Mania initiative by LexArts. Horse Mania, which debuted in 2000, has been brought back for an encore in conjunction with the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games. Local artists are decorating near-to-life-size horses to display around the city; the sculptures later will be auctioned to benefit sponsor-designated charities and LexArts public arts projects.

Horse Play will work along the same lines, with the auction proceeds going to the schools’ art programs and to LexArts’ Youth Arts Council.

Students’ entries will be on display in public libraries around town from July 1 through the World Equestrian Games, which close in October.

The teachers can already see the project's positive ripple effects.

“It helps show how art is valued in each school,” said Selby of Clays Mill Elementary.

At Tates Creek Middle, Bricking suggested the project is connecting people throughout the district. For instance, he can talk about his students’ stained-glass horse with his second-grade son, who is helping decorate the foal at Millcreek Elementary.

“To have that common language between artists is really neat,” he said.