Literary and visual arts combine for student workshops

More than 300 students from schools across the county participated in the Tony Scott Art Bridges Education workshops Thursday and Friday.

The workshops were conducted by Larry Percy and Adams Vines, Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellows, and Tara Sartorius, former curator of education at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.

The workshops were sponsored by the Troy-Pike Cultural Arts Center with grant support from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and Walmart DC 7019 in Brundidge.

Morgan Drinkard, Center executive director, said the workshops integrated the literary and visual arts into the earth and space science curriculum.

The workshops were made available to the students of teachers who attended the teachers’ workshops offered by the Troy-Pike Cultural Arts Center in the summer of 2013.

“Working with Larry Percy and on tablets of clay, the students used a variety of textures and clay working tools to create frames,” Drinkard said. “The frames will be fired and glazed,” Drinkard said. “Adam Vines’ words and measures of poetry motivated the students to write their own poems.

Their poems will be framed in the clay frames that they created.”

Drinkard said the framed poems will be the focus of an exhibition at the Johnson Center for the Arts in the spring.

Three hundred and fifth students in grade eight through 12 participated in the six workshop sessions. Participating schools were Charles Henderson middle and high schools, Pike County and Goshen high schools, Banks Middle School and Pike Liberal Arts School.

Troy University art students rolled the clay tablets used to make the clay frames.