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

By Kelly Moyer-Wade

The Gresham Outlook, Jan 26, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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.”

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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.”

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