Art brightens a room. Walk into a public place, a co-worker’s home, accountant’s office, or even a church entryway and there will be one or more prints, paintings, or photographs. At Keep Alliance Beautiful’s downtown office we have a mural-style banner.
Without consulting a tape measure, I would say this piece is about 25 feet long by 18 inches tall. Walking from left to right the artists painted: “AMS Recycling” with a hand dropping a sheet of paper into a blue receptacle; a tree by a trash container with a student throwing in a bag of trash; a farmer in a tractor driving through a lush green field; a police car on a street below a bi-plane trailing a “KAB” banner; “LITTER PREVENTION”, “Keep Alliance Beautiful”, the KAB logo; then a multi-colored pickup driving to the Central Park fountain; and, one hand passing a flower to another hand above what may be Laing Lake. The work also proclaims “AMS Art Club! 2000/2001” in the lower right corner. Teacher Bonnie Dietrich’s artists added their signatures throughout the project.
Dr. Troy Unzicker, APS superintendent and KAB boardmember, passed along the banner after it was found rolled up by trophy cases this past summer.
Most of the students’ names were still familiar to me even though 20 years have passed. Do they remember creating this KAB-inspired painting, how do they feel about recycling and the environment as adults?
I am currently working to contact the former middle school artists to find out. First, I talked to Sara (Watson) Cummings. She was in sixth grade then and graduated from AHS in 2007. Sara has been married to Cory Cummings (also an AHS grad) for eight years and works as a director of sales for Stanley Black & Decker in Seattle. She and Cory like to camp, hike, kayak and spend time whenever they can in the outdoors of the Pacific Northwest.
“I don’t have any memory of the specific project,” she said. “We did painting for KAB trashcans around AMS.”
As far as interest in art since the turn of the century, Sara commented, “I am not an artist (but I) do enjoy crafting. I attribute some of that to art class and activities (at school).”
What stuck in middle school for her was “a lot of projects KAB introduced us to . . . KAB introduced me to recycling. It’s everywhere now.”
Sara said Seattle is a very green city. “All the work KAB did in educating kids was really a foundation. Now with climate change, it’s all the more important. I’m very thankful for that.”
Waste management at the Cummings’ house is heavy on recycling. Sara said they pay a garbage bill with recycling picked up at the curb for free – no sorting required, just like KAB’s more labor-intensive system. “Probably 3 to 1 recycling to trash,” she added.
To increase recycling, “you make it convenient. Makes it so much easier to be part of your everyday life,” Sara said.
Keep Alliance Beautiful’s commitment to education has endured in the generation since then Executive Director Deb Dopheide and others collaborated with the AMS Art Club.
“KAB was pretty instrumental in educating that generation,” Sara reiterated, “and the impact on the environment.”