Ringgold, McGuffey students complete Artist Residency Project with Pittsburgh-area artist
Courtesy of Marlynn White
Eighth-grade students craft a mural using unconventional art supplies – hammers, nails and soda cans – in Marlynn White’s art class as part of the Artist Residency Project. The project, which invited artist Lindsay Huff into the Ringgold Middle School classroom, was funded through grants and White’s fundraising efforts.
Courtesy of Michelle Urbanek
A McGuffey middle-schooler solders stained glass together with copper wire as part of the artist residency project. Lindsay Huff, a metalsmith with the Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media, worked with Michelle Urbanek’s students to complete hanging sun-catchers earlier this year.
Courtesy of Michelle Urbanek
Sun-catchers created from soldered stained glass and horseshoes hang in a McGuffey Middle School hallway, where student artists, staff and visitors admire the works catching light. Art teacher Michelle Urbanek said displaying student art is important for creators and adds personality to the school.
Courtesy of Michelle Urbanek
Sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade art students in Michelle Urbanek’s class worked with resident artist Lindsay Huff to create sun- catchers, made of stained glass and upcycled horseshoes. Urbanek said she learned alongside her students, which is one of the benefits of working with outside art organizations like PCA&M.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays for the last six weeks, the Ringgold Middle School art room has sounded more like a wood shop than a creative studio.
That’s because eighth-graders have been hard at work cutting and nailing recycled aluminum to wooden slats, creating an enormous mural focused on the ideas of collaboration, reuse and the environment as part of the school’s Artist Residency Project, in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media.
“You don’t really think about a hammer being a creative tool,” said Lindsay Huff, Assistant to Artists in Schools & Communities, metalsmithing studio coordinator and enamelist at PCA&M. “Sometimes you get the message when you’re in art classes, if your teacher’s only focusing on certain kinds of skills, oh, art is not for me. There are so many different ways to be creative.”
Marlynn White’s art students are exploring art differently as they collaborate to create a 9-by-18-foot mosaic mural representing sunrise over the Monongahela River and its wide variety of fish residents, using recycled pop cans. The project is the brainchild of Huff and White, the latter of whom wanted to incorporate reuse into the large mosaic project.
“As far as the theme, that was mostly just Lindsay and I discussing some ideas, how we can incorporate the community. I really liked the idea of using metals – metal is not something that I typically work with. I also liked the idea of reusing materials,” White said. “I wanted to have an expert come in in an area where I am not an expert. An artist has a specialized area and they can give the students more than maybe what I could give them. I’m learning right along with the kids. Lindsay’s been fantastic.”
Huff, a Pittsburgh-based metalworking artist whose first love is jewelry and wearable art, taught students how to safely cut cans and affix them to wooden bases before the class dove headfirst into the collaborative mural project.
“If you’re going to do a project in a school, the cost of working with brass or silver or copper, that’s not really feasible. I started doing the projects actually during summer camps, hammering cans on wood. It’s an everyday object that resonates with students. It’s really just a lovely material to work with, oddly,” Huff said. “I thought water would be a very interesting theme. The Monongahela, it’s a big landmark. I saw that Mingo Creek was down here. Everybody experiences the water in some way.”
Students are getting an unconventionally tactile river experience as they work, often outside their friend groups, to re-create native fish out of La Croix and Coca-Cola cans.
“One kid … called them Dr. Pepper fish. She was only using Dr. Pepper cans. I had another two or three students who worked on rainbow fish. They sorted out all the colors of the rainbow so it had an ombre effect. Seeing those totally self-generated ideas, I think that’s really special,” Huff said. “I’m just always impressed by the ways different groups of students will collaborate with each other. I love to see the sense of teamwork.”
It’s been an all-hands-on-deck art project, for sure. The Artist Residency is made possible through the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Through that funding, McGuffey School District was able to welcome Huff into its middle school, where the artist worked with middle and high school art teacher Michelle Urbanek’s students to craft ethereal sun-catchers from stained glass and horseshoes.
“I wanted to use stained glass because it was a material I had plenty of already,” Urbanek said. “Students made chains, they enameled metal, they did some resin casting. They did a bunch of stuff for this project. The most challenging part was figuring out how to get the glass connected to the horseshoe.”
Students, under Huff’s instruction, wrapped copper wire through small holes in the horseshoes and around the shoes themselves, soldered the two materials together and then soldered the stained glass to that piece.
“We were melting metal with sixth-graders. We called it mini welding, to make career connections for them,” said Urbanek.
Urbanek, whose favorite thing to teach is fiber arts, said she had never worked with stained glass or soldered before, so she learned alongside her students. That’s the beauty of welcoming a working artist into the classroom: It strengthens a school’s art program.
“It gives validity to the program,” said Urbanek. “There are artists out there, making a living making art. It gives perspective: I’m not the only one creating art and telling them what to do. It shows them (career) possibilities and gives me new ideas.”
The sun-catchers now decorate a section of the middle school hallway, where they hang in a window, catching sunlight and the attention of passersby.
“It’s really good to have art hanging in the school. It gives them ownership, it gives them a sense of pride,” Urbanek said. “It gives personality to the school, identity.”
The upcycled mosaic mural will be installed on the first floor of Ringgold middle school and revealed April 21, opening night of the middle school musical.
“Students and any visitors or teachers can view it for years to come,” said White. “It’s something kids can look back on. It will be there forever.”