Creating outdoor creative art by upcycling

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Every year Horseshoe Trails Elementary school ("HTES") invites an outside artist to work with our students to create artwork that is placed throughout our campus. The purpose is twofold 1)to encourage creative expression and 2) to encourage students to play outdoors by making it a visually appealing place to be. This year HTES wanted to align the Artist in Residence project with our "Green" efforts.  As such, our art teacher, sought out to find an artist that upcycles trash to create unique artwork.  After much research, we found her! http://sharikeith.com/   Shari Keith refers to herself as "the junk lady" as she sees art in things others consider trash.  After a meeting with Shari, Carolynn (our art teacher) and our principal, a project was decided upon and a list of items (trash!) to collect was generated.  A list of the following items was sent out to our 400 families and the response was fabulous:

• -bottle caps.  the more colorful the better
• -old easter eggs
• -the "bottom of the toybox toys"
• -colorful plastic soda or shampoo bottles
• -combs
• -old razor handles
• -metal lids
• -margarine containers
• -altoid containers
• -colorful plastic spoons
• -packing tape dispensers
• -sock hangers

• As trash was brought in and placed in a designated bin in the front office, volunteers and our art teacher, made sure items
  were clean and plastic bottles were cut in half. 

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•  Each of our 685 students was presented with a bin of trash that they were instructed to make chimes with.  That was a lot of trash that was diverted from our landfills!

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•  The artwork was hung all around our outdoor classroom/garden to encourage students and teachers to utilize the area and also to discourage birds from helping themselves to our tomatoes!

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• The program was quite successful as both children and adults alike were intrigued by the beauty that was generated by something that most would normally toss in the trash.  It is our contention that in the future, our students will be inspired by this project to think twice before discarding something that they may find another creative use for. In addition to the chimes, three flower structures were created by old unused snowshoes.  It provided a much needed pop of color and visually interesting structure to our campus.

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 Even more exciting news came when we heard a local magazine was writing an article about our efforts.  See attached link for the article. http://www.raisingarizonakids.com/2014/04/upcycled-plastic-becomes-artwork/