FOOTPATH TO PEACE

YMCA coordinator steps up for Global Art Project

By DENISE DICK

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

Some people paint their toenails, but Suzanne Bort Gray uses the whole foot as art.The art coordinator at the Davis Family YMCA in Boardman is looking for volunteers who will paint their feet and allow them to be used in the Global Art Project for Peace.

She’s been participating in the Global Art Project since 2004.

“There’s a woman in Arizona who started the program in 1994,” said Gray, an artist and international volunteer for the project.

All the works have a peace theme, and the pieces are exchanged with another submission from another part of the country or the world.

Last year’s work submitted by the Y depicted the silhouettes of four children with the countries of the world on them.

The piece was a mosaic of the faces of Y members and employees. It was sent to a small village in Senegal. In return, the Y received a videotape of the villagers singing, dancing and drumming.

That artwork, titled “One Piece One Peace,” was selected to be part of a 2010 Multicultural World Calendar.

Gray doesn’t know to what country this year’s Y submission will go.

“We never know until about March,” she said.

It will be a concept similar to last year’s montage, but instead of being comprised of faces, feet will make up the larger picture. Peaceful Soleutions is its title.

She needs 1,000 separate pictures to create the completed work.

“So far, I have less than three dozen feet done,” Gray said.

Some of her art students colored the bottoms of their feet with bright-colored markers to be included in the montage.

Gray hopes more people step up to participate, too.

More information is available at www.1000footprints.blogspot.com. She’ll also have a table set up at Saturday’s “An Afternoon of the Arts.” The event, from 1:30 to 4 p.m. at the Y, McClurg Road, features art from Y members, dancing, a puppet show, professional artists at work, poetry readings, kids crafts and live music.

Much of Gray’s own art as well as what she does with students in her Y art classes involves photos of feet. It stems from a photograph she took of her first grandchild.

“I was looking at these little feet, and they were so cute,” she said.

Gray asked her daughter and son-in-law to pose with their child so that the parents’ feet cradled and wrapped around the baby’s.

The theme stuck.

About a dozen of her images adorn the walls of the New York College of Podiatric Medicine.

She likes the number of possibilities for titles of the pieces: anything including the words heel, toe, arch or sole.

“There are so many possibilities for names,” Gray said.

“Indulging Our Soles” features the feet of women who participated in a Y event drizzled with chocolate. The feet then are placed into a photograph to become part of a banana split.

“American Beauty Toepiary” shows the feet of the women in Gray’s family, positioned this way and that, to form a topiary of feet.

“My family, friends and people at the Y have been great,” Gray said of their participation in her work.

denise_dick@vindy.com