Woven Together

A collaborative project between the students, faculty, and staff of Smithland Elementary School and Skyline Middle School, Woven Together is a visual representation of each individual's story, shown within the context of our campus community. Participants answered questions about their region of origin, family make-up, favorite subjects, and spoken languages, and their answers were "graphed" onto their respective weaving. As you view this project, we hope you are reminded that while we each have a unique story to tell, our stories overlap and share commonalities with the stories of others in our community.

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A dream of visually representing our unique and diverse learning community was brought to life thanks to a generous grant from the Arts Council of the Valley. The collaborative art installation was partially inspired by the art of Nancy Belmont, the Unity Project installation artist, who designed an  introspective, fantastically fun, interactive public art project. Located in the Del Ray section of Alexandria, VA, the public was invited to define themselves and then celebrate the differences that tie us together and keep us unified. The idea of a way to visually represent our community in our shared campus auditorium space evolved with the idea of wall mounted string art.
Ms Nesmith, art educator at Smithland Elementary and myself teamed up to conceptualize our vision of the installation, define the data points, create the unity lesson/ survey for students and staff, and begin the project planning.

The students and staff of SMES & SKMS were surveyed and the creation of our collaborative project began! Many thanks to our Tech Ed Department for helping to cut our 4' diameter circles as the base for our project. The SMES Art Club painted the tints that became the base for the woven string art created by SKMS art students. Each circle has a number/letter in the center outlined with an equal number of nails representing that group. The outer edge of each circle has nails corresponding to each possible answer from the survey questions.  The finished string art creations are each a unique visual representation of the diversity of our learning communities and elements that help us find the ties that bind us in unity.