This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Arts & Entertainment

At PS 107, a Reminder That Nature is All Around

Giant insects scale a brick wall right off Eighth Avenue.

Nature is all around, even in the big city.

Grass creeps through breaks in the sidewalk, flies flit their way on to the subway. There are many reminders if we pay attention.

So Park Slope artist Marney Fuller decided to point out more prominently the oft-ignored dual existence of Creation and the created urban environment with a series of larger-than-life galvanized steel insects attached like superheroes to the southern side wall of PS 107 on Eighth between 13th and 14th streets.

Find out what's happening in Park Slopewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

It was in the fall of 2008 when Fuller, then a parent of a PS 107 student, approached the primary school’s principal, Cynthia Holton, and its co-PTA presidents Mary Vines and Stuart Miller to propose working with each of the schools’ more than 300 children to build an enormous wire spider sculpture for the schoolyard.

“The biggest thing in working with kids is to break them of the idea that they can’t do art, that it’s scary,” said Fuller, a painter with a studio in DUMBO who brings the message of can-do, mixed-media art projects to a number of public schools that have lost arts funding and to Art Workshop Experience, a summer program for young artists.

Find out what's happening in Park Slopewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Fuller included all seven of PS 107’s grade levels in the project, fitting tasks to the different age group’s capabilities. The young Pre-K kids began by creating balls of the steel wire for the body, fifth graders were assigned the final task of intertwining the wire to form the spider’s many legs.

The galvanized steel, chosen because it would withstand the weather without rusting for years and would be easy for students to manipulate, was picked up from Greschlers Hardware on 18th Street and Fifth Avenue in the Slope, as were the plumbing tape, nuts and bolts used to put the sculpture together.

A couple of kids did think the project scary at first, but more because of the idea of a spider, Fuller laughed. She helped them get over it with her own passion for painting and observing insects.
 
“Spiders are sexy, so are so many insects!” she enthused. Her enthusiasm for the project was, obviously, infectious.

“These big projects can be laborious and time-consuming, not just instantly gratifying, which teaches kids the great reward of working toward a major goal. It is so rewarding at the end!”

Installed on to the red bricks on the side of the building, the spider looms large over the concrete schoolyard, just high enough to (mostly) avoid attack by balls and climbing boys. Last fall, the school’s lower grades were put to work once again by Ms. Fuller, this time to create a caterpillar. The bug brigade was joined by a butterfly in April, created by the upper grades, as well as a web.
 
The project, now referred to as the "PS 107 Ecosystem," is an eye-catching public display that forces passersby to remember the great, powerful forces of nature, the things we might forget about as they fly around us quietly or scurry about us underfoot.

“I like to push things in my art that are so familiar to us that we become blind to them,” Fuller said. 

The metaphors of the insects were not lost on her either, like the caterpillar turning into a butterfly, symbolic, she said, of the children who between Pre-K and graduate go through their own metamorphosis. The spider, of course, represents the industriousness of school itself, its beauty and creativity.

“Metaphorically, that is what school teaches us to do, to move forward,” she said.

With or without the symbolism, the wire sculptures are a sight to behold, a refreshing reminder to things we sometimes forget to remember.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?