Living canvas - A 'sky art' specialist arranges 450 children into the shape of a condor
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
KIMBERLY A.C. WILSON
The Oregonian

For nearly an hour, it seemed that only the sky would ever see the 200-foot California condor created by 450 shivering students at the Lent School in Southeast Portland.

Then a donated Portland Fire Bureau tower ladder truck belatedly arrived and sky artist Daniel Dancer rose 85 feet in the air to capture the sight on video and film.

"Take the picture," yelled some fidgety boys, weary of squatting over the school's snowy ground.

"Stay down," was school Principal Linda Ralley's good natured admonishment.

At her eye-level, all that was visible was a sea of excited and complaining kids positioned along a shape lined with bark chips, manure and leaves. But from above, with the youngest children dressed in white T-shirts forming the under feathers and the older ones wearing black to accent the wings, they embodied an ancient bird that once flew across Oregon skies.

"Think of the children as paint droplets," Dancer explained.

A specialist in "sky art," Dancer has traveled the U.S. and Canada, creating giant grizzlies, cougars, big horn sheep visible from the air using school children as paint drops. Last week, the conceptual artist and founder of Rowena Wilds, a 200-acre, eco-community near Hood River, brought his program to a Portland school for the first time.

"He's been all over the country but he'd never been to our school district," said Rebecca Rothery, a sixth-grade teacher at Lent who invited him to create sky art there.

Last week, Dancer taught students at the Southeast K-6 school about the plight of the California condor and the 3,000 year-old art form his work is based on, still visible in shapes etched into the desert plains of Peru. Conservation, global warming, mathematics and history rounded out the curriculum.

After a snow-day delay Thursday, Dancer and the students returned Friday to re-create a massive, graceful carrion scavenger now largely confined in zoos and captive-breeding programs. Through breeding efforts, the wild population has grown fivefold since 1987.

Dubbed the "Vulture of the Columbia," in Lewis and Clark's journals from the 1800s, the long-beaked bird has a wingspan of about 9.5 feet with a nearly bald head, kaleidoscopic neck, and feathers of black with white under their wings.

That's where the kids came in. Dressed in coats against the chilly weather, the students filed into place on the school's field, inside an outline formed with leaves and bark chips donated by a local nursery and punctuated with colorful clothing donated by the neighborhood Goodwill.

"It's a pretty cool way of creating color," Dancer said, "and the whole thing is a sort of celebration of the possibility of bringing the condor back to Oregon outside of a zoo."

For nearly an hour, the students milled about on the field, waiting for the fire truck. After a short period back inside, they returned to the playing field, crouching to offer their backs to the sky. When it was over, the kids yelled, "Sky, we love you."

"This teaches them about impermanent art," Dancer said. "It's the experience and the give away aspect of it for the sky, for the creator, a gift in the tradition of the indigenous, art for the sky, not for galleries or to be purchased that makes this special."

"It's like Immanuel Kant said about peace, to achieve it on earth, humans must learn to see the whole first," he said.

It's the message that Dancer tries to communicate to school students.

He'll return to outer Northeast Portland in two weeks for another project at H.B. Lee Middle School. Like the Lents' event, it'll be funded through grants from Seattle's Raynier Institute & Foundation, an organization that supports efforts on behalf of the environment, conservation and education.

Kimberly Wilson: 503-412-7017; kimberlywilson@ news.oregonian.com
©2007 The Oregonian