Student artists from Blount County’s five public high schools turned the five manhole covers in Greenway Village into canvases on Saturday, Oct. 24, and downtown Maryville ended the day with five new pieces of public art that most people will walk right over.
That’s part of the charm. The new development sits between Maryville City Hall and the Blount County Courthouse, with the Maryville-Alcoa Greenway running through the middle of it, so plenty of feet will cross the courthouse, the Smokies, a raccoon on the state flag and the other designs now painted underfoot.
The painting day was the final round of a contest organized by Cody McCoy, owner of the Great American Cookies & Marble Slab Creamery in Greenway Village. One winning design came from each school — Alcoa, Eagleton College and Career Academy, Heritage, Maryville and William Blount — and each was painted by the student who drew it, in some cases with a classmate alongside.
Five covers, five schools
The idea started with a remark from the engineering office: someone there had seen painted manhole covers in Tokyo. McCoy looked it up. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I like it,’” he said. Developer James Tomiczek got the project approved, “and that was kind of it.”
McCoy wanted the high schools involved from the start, and the numbers made the format easy. “Once we found out that we have five manhole covers that we could paint, it kind of lined up with, ‘Oh, we have five public high schools. Let’s make a contest,’” he said.
He reached out to the art teacher at each school, and every school could submit as many designs as it wanted. The business owners in the development voted on one design from each school, and those five students were invited to come paint.
Each of the five winners gets a year of Double Doozies, the cookie sandwiches from McCoy’s shop. Once the covers are finished, the same panel of business owners will vote on an overall winner, and that school’s art department will receive a $500 donation.
The prompt was simple: what does Tennessee mean to you? “What does East Tennessee remind you of?” is how Eagleton’s Skyla Haywood remembered it. The answers covered a lot of ground for five circles of iron.
Heritage’s Isaiah Brock chose the courthouse, which stands a short walk from where he was painting. “To me, I just find it almost like the capital of Maryville,” he said. “This is just what I think of Maryville.”
Maryville High’s Mia Aguilar chose the Smokies. “I wanted to incorporate the Smoky Mountains in the background, and then I just wanted to fill as much of the manhole cover as I could,” she said.
William Blount’s Jayda Griffin and B.J. Mize went with state symbols: the state animal and the state flower over the state flag. Tennessee’s state animal, for anyone who didn’t know, is the raccoon. “I didn’t know it either,” said Mize, who drew the design. “I thought it was really cute, though.”
Alcoa sent Briana Kimber, whose sketchbook design was chosen, and classmate Jae Hebert. Theirs is a tour of East Tennessee: an orange checkered border around dogwood blossoms, butterflies, scenes from the Smokies and Pigeon Forge, and the Sunsphere.
Haywood’s own answer was a night scene of the mountains: “I thought about the mountains, the nature.” The cover itself took some getting used to. “It’s definitely different,” Haywood said. “It’s kind of interesting doing the little dips.”
Raquel Roy, the art teacher at Maryville High School, had about 12 students submit designs before Mia Aguilar’s was picked. For her, the appeal of the contest is exactly that it isn’t a canvas.
“Having competitions like this that are super different — a unique place and a unique surface, instead of painting on a canvas and submitting that to an art show — is what an artist should really learn to be, which is flexible,” Roy said.
“Having that flexibility to produce something not just on a two-dimensional, flat, perfect surface is really important to learn. How to grow and kind of stretch your mind to mix the colors and do the drawing, and then getting it to last as well.”
Minda Cedeno, the art teacher at Alcoa High School, brought the contest to her advanced class as a sketchbook homework assignment, and Briana Kimber’s design was picked. Cedeno says her students get plenty of requests to paint murals around the community, and she is selective about which ones they take.
“We get asked a lot to do things for businesses that don’t want to pay for professional artists, and I will not do that to my students, or myself,” she said. “This one was different. There was a prize for them. There’s a prize for the school. It’s more of a contest. It doesn’t take the whole class. It doesn’t take class time. They liked the idea of it.”
Next year: lights, a band and art for sale
The Greenway Village business owners choose the overall winner on Monday, Oct. 26.
McCoy is already planning a bigger version. “Next year, I’m gonna do something different,” he said. “I’m gonna make it a live art show where the schools can sell artwork, do it at night with the lights, try to get a band.”
Until then, the five covers are in the common area at Greenway Village, worth a look down the next time you’re on the greenway.
