Walter Anderson Museum of Art hosts Public Enterprise Summer Camp
The Walter Anderson Museum of Art is dedicated to empowering lifelong curiosity and connection to the natural world through art. One way they do that is by pouring into the younger generations.
There’s a little time to create and a time to remember the past, but with the Public Art Enterprise Summer Camp, students get to do both at the same time.
For the first time ever, the Walter Anderson Museum brought the unique summer camp to the City of Waveland. Executive Director Julian Rankin said, “The whole premise is to use public art as a way to really bring students into the design process, give them STEM skills, welding experience, and work with communities to put permanent large-scale sculptures in their downtown communities, and really it’s a part of community and economic development.”
The free four-day summer camp empowers high school aged students to conceptualize, design, and help build a large-scale public sculpture for the City of Waveland.
On Wednesday, the campers headed out to Cat Island to see what they could find that would bring life to their creation. “We were sourcing material. Things with USM Marine Education Center. They went out there with us, so some of these shells and debris will find themselves into the sculpture as inspiration with glass, tiles, and some of the other forms that will be welded. So again, it’s just like Walter Anderson venturing out and bringing inspiration back home.”
The sculpture will be located in the heart of Waveland, right in front of the Ground Zero Museum. It will be five 13-feet totems, which was the same height of Katrina’s storm surge.
The piece as a whole isn’t just about Katrina, but it’s all about the resilience and the community building that took place after the tragedy. Studio Waveland Glass Artist Mitchell Gaudet said, “I mean this is something that will live in the community a long time, and it’s going to be made my people in the community. People that work here, as well as live here, using elements of the community to remember good things and a few bad things about Hancock County and the City of Waveland. We’re excited to be kind of the fabricators of this collaboration.”
Not only are the students working together to create a huge sculpture in front of the Ground Zero museum. They’re also getting time to work on their own individual sculptures that they’ll get to bring home. “When you’re working with kids, they have a much more freeing experience or approach to things. They’re not so restricted by and worrying about things, so it liberates us. It’s a symbiotic relationship between teacher and students, and you really don’t even have a teacher student relationship with them, so we’re kind of working together to do the best project possible.”
