Creating aerial art
Nationally recognized artist Daniel Dancer helps H.B. Lee students see the big picture of endangered species as he directs them to form a giant sturgeon
Photo courtesy of Daniel Dancer / The Outlook
H.B. Lee Middle School students form the shape of a sturgeon during Daniel Dancer's Art for the Sky project, which attempts to give people a something Dancer calls our innate “sky sightedness.”
Hunched over, their backs facing the sky, 13-year-old Vincent Lam and his classmates, Danna Said and Alberto Tirado, waited for the man with the bullhorn to set them free.
“The eyes need to be tighter. Get on your hands and knees,” the bullhorn-wielding man, who just happened to be suspended a nose-bleeding 180 feet above H.B. Lee Middle School on Thursday afternoon, shouted to the 840 “tweens” below him.
Lam and his friends didn’t worry about getting on their hands and knees. They were part of the fin, not the eyes.
In an hour, once the bullhorn man processed the photo he was about to take, the students would cease looking like students. Instead, they would become a gigantic sturgeon.
That was later, though. Right now, from the ground, the group looked nothing like a sturgeon. They were just a bunch of boisterous middle-schoolers dressed in shades of black and red standing on pre-approved lines, bent over as if picking some grass from their shoes. In one corner of the field boys teased girls with some worms they had discovered poking around in the mud.
Yes, from the ground, it was nothing special.
Up in the sky, things looked a lot different.
Daniel Dancer, a nationally recognized artist, was doing what he does best — giving orders through a bullhorn while swaying in a cherry picker suspended 15 stories above the ground.
“OK. That looks beautiful. Now, let’s say a prayer for all endangered species,” Dancer shouted. He followed — as did the students and teachers huddled on the ground — with a Lakota saying that means “flow like the water.”
A few seconds later, the sturgeon was gone. Students streamed back inside of H.B. Lee’s walls. The only remnant of the art they had helped created was in their memories and, of course, in Dancer’s cameras.
“How many kids get to go home and tell their parents, ‘I was part of a sturgeon today?’ ” Dancer says, after coming back to the ground. “They looked great.”
The gathering was part of Dancer’s ongoing Art for the Sky project, which attempts to give people a something Dancer calls our innate “sky sightedness.”
The concept goes something like this: sometimes you have to remove yourself from the world around you to see the bigger picture.
On the ground, the children Dancer poses look like children. From the sky, however, they become dots. These dots have made turtles, mountains, even sturgeon — but the pictures are only visible from the sky.
H.B. Lee art teacher Jaimi Anke said the project was empowering for her children and for the school, which is one of the highest poverty middle schools in the Portland area. More than unifying the students and teachers, Anke said, Dancer’s weeklong school-based project taught them about the environmental issues.
“Our students have very little contact with nature,” said H.B. Lee Principle Carla Sosanya-Tellez. “So I really like the idea of them learning how we are connected, both to the natural world and to each other.”
The middle school collaborated with non-profit environmental advocacy group Columbia Riverkeeper to bring Dancer’s Art for the Sky to H.B. Lee.
Brent Foster, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper said the image of the sturgeon is a key component to this particular Art for the Sky project.
“It shows a strong connection to the river,” Foster said. “In the Columbia River, a sturgeon is like the canary in the coal mine. This is the species we look at when we want to see how healthy the river is.”
Having the children connect to this type of local environmental project was important to Foster’s group and to the administrators at H.B. Lee, but it was more important that the children enjoyed their lesson and Dancer’s project was a unique way of doing that.
“Every kid left here smiling,” Foster said. “If they’re having fun, they’re going to remember this, they’re going to carry these (environmental) lessons with them.”
Dancer will go to other schools along the Columbia River next month to build more “art for the sky.”
To view his previous works, or to find out more about Dancer’s “Art for the Sky” projects, visit www.inconcertwithnature.com.