Blair Oaks High School is in the running to win up to $75,000 for the Blair Oaks R-2 district's art program, all because of a couple pairs of shoes and some creativity.
Blair Oaks High School is the only Missouri finalist left in the Vans Custom Culture art competition, sponsored by the Costa Mesa, California-based Vans skateboard shoe and apparel company.
Members of the community have the opportunity to vote daily for Blair Oaks through Friday at vans.com/customculture, and the winners of the contest will be announced May 7. Four runner-up schools will win $10,000 each.
After her "cry and freak out, at first" reaction to winning either amount of money, Blair Oaks High School art teacher Kayla Kehl said she would use the prize to help grow the school's art course offerings and equipment.
Kehl wrote in the impact statement attached to the school's contest submission the high amount of student interest she sees in art at Blair Oaks "shows me that the students are open and willing to give art a chance, but I don't have the money to be able to order enough supplies to expose the students to all that is the art world."
Kehl is a 2010 Blair Oaks graduate and in her third year of teaching at the school. There are plans to purchase a screen-printing kit to allow for students to design, produce and sell custom t-shirts on campus, as opposed to the current arrangement of hiring that work out, she said. She wrote in the impact statement that the funds raised from screen-printed merchandise sales would be used to support the Art Club.
"Art Club's goal is to create an art-friendly school environment and encourage students who 'can't draw' to find a way to feel successful with the visual arts. I believe we can make a real impact on those students who feel like they haven't found their path yet," she wrote.
She said the high school also will have ceramics and 3-D art courses next school year for the first time, though working with those media and techniques has high startup costs. One pottery wheel costs $400, and she has two classes of about 30 students in each, she said.
She wrote in the impact statement there's currently only enough money available to buy two table-top pottery wheels, and she'd also like to get supplies to teach oil painting and etching.
"We try to use recycled materials to help budget, but you can only get so far with pencils, paper, magazines and paint," she wrote.
If Blair Oaks won the contest and there was any money left over, she said, Blair Oaks Elementary School goes through a lot of art supplies, too, and the prize would be shared to take care of needs throughout the district. She wrote she and others want to be sure the district has enough money to include an auditorium in the plans for a new high school.
Blair Oaks is in the running in the Vans contest with high schools from 28 others states, including multiple schools in Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.
People who visit Vans' website will see other schools' designs that include sea life, ships, boats, cars, dragons, horses, easels and all sorts of colors, designs and configurations.
Blair Oaks' submissions include a pair of shoes under the theme "Local Flavor" and another with the miscellaneous "Off the Wall" theme.
Anyone who looks at the photos of Blair Oaks and other schools' submissions can see the contest isn't so much about creating a wearable pair of shoes but about seeing what can be done with the shoes sent to the schools as material.
Kehl said most art competitions have strict guidelines, but Vans' is more a simple celebration of art.
"The shoes are an odd piece of art to begin with, and you have to work with this strange form," she said of how students brainstormed about what they could do with them.
She said the pair with the Gateway Arch - the "Local Flavor" theme - as its centerpiece was the result of looking at past winners' work and noting they often changed the basic structure of the shoes. The arch itself is made of paper, tape and spray paint, she said.
The other pair that shows organs is the result of staring at a pair of shoes with laces and wondering, "What can we wrap through here?" That led to the idea of stitches and a view inside a body.
Kehl said students went with organs because they thought that's the most interesting part of the body to look at that keeps "the creepy factor without it being grotesque." The organs inside the shoes are clay, painted and sprayed over with a shiny gloss, she said.
She said Zoe Baker, Makenna Johnson, Makenna Kliethermes, Madison Moore and Alex Wortmann were the students who worked on the shoes.