Bartlesville High School art students reproduce 'Custer's Last Fight'
A partnership between Woolaroc and Bartlesville High’s art department is complementing the museum’s efforts to restore treasured paintings in their art collection while exposing students to the art world.
Shiloh Thurman, Woolaroc museum director, said he has been wanting to do a project like this for the last couple of years as paintings removed for cleaning and restoration presents an opportunity to fill the space.
“We started brainstorming ways of how we could get high school art students involved with Woolaroc and give them an avenue for a future art career outside of high school. It's been very rewarding,” he said.
For their first project, Lea Burke’s honors art students used a paint-by-grid technique to replicate William R. Leigh’s "Custer’s Last Fight," which is now on display through June.
From a blown-up photograph copy of the original painting and a grid overlay, the image was divided into squares. Each student painted one or more squares on 12x12 canvas panels. Every panel was labeled by row and column so that they could be pieced together and affixed to a backing at the museum and mounted next to the original painting.
Burke said they chose this as their first project because it was something that all the students could be part of.
“We didn’t even sign our painting, I wanted it to be something they thought of as a whole rather than their own individual piece,” Burke said.
Unlike many museums that are only able to display 10% of their collection at a time, Thurman said that Woolaroc is almost the exact opposite, leaving fewer items available for rotation.
“We maintain close to 80% on display,” he said.
"Custer's Last Fight" depicts the historic Battle of the Little Bighorn where George Armstrong Custer and his forces were defeated by the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.
“With this piece, in particular, it tells the Native American’s perspective of Custer’s Last Stand where you can see the Native Americans in the foreground and in the background you can kind of see through the haze, you can see Custer and his men on the hilltop,” Thurman said.
Thurman hopes it to be the first of many kinds of projects in the future, including juried competitions that would allow individual students to interpret pieces in the Woolaroc collection.
“It could be an exact interpretation, it could be styled differently — however they want to do it — but then it’s juried by me and the art teacher and that one will replace the one in the museum,” Thurman said. “That gives them exposure to how juried contests would be done in the future if they want to pursue a career in the art industry.”
Burke wrote grants for the project which secured funds from the Bartlesville Public Schools Foundation and Oklahoma Department of Education for canvases, paint and brushes.
This article originally appeared on Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise: Bartlesville students create 'Custer's Last Fight' for Woolaroc museum
