STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS BY COOPER MORTON

It was fleeting—a surprise for the commuters who made the crawl along Hailey’s Main Street and even the students behind the pop-up art show.

Students of the 8/9 Band at The Sage School headquartered in Hailey’s Quigley Canyon hosted a pop-up art show in the snow between Carbonate and Bullion streets this past week for one day only. It was the culminating event of the student’s fall trimester.

Brooke Vagias’ artwork pays homage to Naomi Osaka, a world-renowned tennis player who spoke out against racism in sports and fought for mental health care for professional athletes, contending that athletes are not treated as people but as entertainment.

The outdoor display featured 5-foot-tall interactive sculptures representing literal and figurative interpretations of 21st century social justice changemakers. The students created the sculptures as part of their Human Ecology study on community relationships.

The project asked students to explore the lives and leaderships of contemporary changemakers, examining their leadership styles and evaluating the risks and rewards of putting conviction into action. The students then created physical representations of their changemakers, embodying the person’s stance or actions.

One sculpture, for instance, featured a sculpture of director and musician Donald Glover standing up against police brutality, his upraised arm with two arms growing out of it clenching a Black Lives Matter message. Another represented Sahra Costello and Kayla Kazyca, podcasters-turned aroace activists.

The public part of the project was a surprise to the students so it was kept under wraps, meaning that unfortunately community members who might have liked to have perused them did not know of them in time to see them.

This work commended Venus Williams, who won seven Grand Slam singles titles and five Olympic medals while successfully fighting for equal prize money for women in a sport that had refused to pay women’s and men’s players equally.

This sculpture recognizes David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting and cofounder of March For Our Lives, which organized the biggest gun violence march in history. Hogg also co-founded Leaders We Deserve, a youth-run organization that assists young political candidates.

This sculpture by Dash Kolar honors Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court Justice who fought for women’s right and gender equality under the law from the time she broke through the glass ceiling to become a lawyer in a time when women were considered mentally inferior to men.