A luminescent blue jellyfish swims along the currents of a royal blue ocean. Shiny bubbles float to the surface while deep below, a half mermaid, half deer lies on the ocean floor.
This is not a scene from a fantasy novel. It’s a real space open to explore in the basement of the South Side on Lamar building in Dallas.
Since February, Parish Episcopal School students Sahara Tran, Marley Martinez and Elliott Lewis have spent hundreds of hours bringing this room to life with the help of their art teacher Beka Johnson. They’re one of six teams of high school students participating in the program Spark! Prismatic: Fantastical Realms Art Pop-up Experience. It’s the second annual partnership between Meow Wolf Grapevine and Spark! Dallas, a nonprofit focused on hands-on learning.
Kaitlyn Armendáriz, Meow Wolf’s regional impact director, said the program is an opportunity for students to learn life skills while making art.
“It's also really giving them this kind of firsthand experience at collaboration, at problem solving, at budgeting,” she said. It’s the “idea of integrating creativity into anything you're doing, being a creative thinker and a creative problem solver.”
In February, each team of students was tasked with transforming stark white rooms into magical 3D immersive spaces for the public with a goal of using about one third recycled materials.
In the end, six rooms were created, each with its own distinctive style and color. There’s the green room that’s an enchanted forest with sprawling green foliage, a red Alice In Wonderland room and a white Atlantis room based on the Greek myth.
Martinez describes their blue room as an “underwater origami forest.”
“We knew we wanted our whole room to give kind of a storybook vibe but also be fantasy. So our goal was to make a lot of things look like they're made out of paper,” she said.
For students, it’s a lesson in how to make the fantastical come to life within the constraints of the real world.
Take the blue team’s “merdeer.” Tran said it was an exciting concept in theory, but much harder to actually construct.
“A few hours ago, our sculpture looked like a dog. Then it looked like a cow, and finally it looked like a deer, so I've actually had to redo the head multiple times and I've had to re-do other parts multiple times just so that it fit and actually looked like what it's supposed to look like,” she said.
Other teams also learned how to solve problems and work together on a deadline. Ana Sanchez, 15, and Ashley de la Cruz, 16, are both students at Williams High School in Plano. Their room is a green enchanted fairy forest. De la Cruz said the theme was inspired by Tinkerbell and follows the story of a boy who was camping with his parents and gets lost after wandering off.
Ana, who was in charge of building the tree, said there have been unexpected challenges.
“It literally broke on us. So we've been building it from scratch and we finally finished it today so we're kind of worried,” she said.
There’s a lot that goes into each of the rooms. First teams developed concepts, then designed and gathered materials and finally came the actual build, which required adding sound and lighting.
Team leader De la Cruz said she’s surprised by “how much time everything actually takes.”
“We're stressing out for three months over this little room so I understand it's harder than I thought,” she said.
It’s a dose of reality that Meow Wolf employees Christy Howell, an exhibition manager, and Georgi Shattuck, an exhibition technical engineer, deal with daily, which is why they’ve served as mentors for the students.
While guiding students, Howell said she focused on “supporting the students without dashing their ideas while simultaneously making sure that you are like ‘Oh, physics doesn't work like that,’ or you also have to have room for people to walk in your room.”
It’s a rare opportunity for participating students to carry out their creative visions from beginning to end. And they’re able to share the final product with family and friends who can tour the space.
For students like De la Cruz, who has wanted to be an architect since she was a young girl, it’s a little taste of what she might experience in the future.
“It's honestly been stressful, but we've gained responsibility off of it. And I just realized how much effort we can all put into something,” she said.
De la Cruz’s art teacher Emily Garner has worked at Williams High School for a decade. She’s participating in the program for a second year because she believes in these real-world projects that teach her students how to tackle issues on a deadline.
“I am a ’90s kid and grew up with Miss Frizzle going out in the real world and getting hands-on experience,” she said.
Howell said she doesn’t expect every student in the program to go into the arts, but she hopes they learn that they are capable of bringing their ideas to fruition.
“Whether that's being able to solve a computer science problem or being able to do the next art installation for the kids that are going to go into art,” she said. “I think that these kinds of problem-solving skills and this kind of self-confidence are really, really valuable to carry into the world.”
Visitors can view the students’ installations from now until September. Tickets are $25 regular admission for adults, $23 for children, $20 for teachers and $40 for adult night (age 21+) which includes two drink tickets.
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