by Joel Addington
Contributing Writer
Steven Roman-Baxendale was busy snapping pictures of everything he saw out of his bus window, most of which dwarfed the vehicle itself.
He photographed longshoremen loading massive cargo ships, containers being hoisted into the air by huge cranes and the sea of cars and trucks parked tightly waiting for transport to dealerships or overseas.
Roman-Baxendale, 16, was one of 150 students from the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts who toured the Jacksonville Port Authority’s Blount Island Marine terminal Friday before moving onto a boat to view the island from the St. Johns River.
The students are participating in “New View,” a three-year-old partnership between the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, the Port Authority and St. Johns Riverkeeper aimed at building awareness for the river as an economic and ecological resource.
By touring the port and the river, the Douglas Anderson students were able to gather the raw material – in the form of sketches and photos – to use in creating a 30-foot mixed-media mural depicting life and commerce on the St. Johns River.
“The next step will be to figure out what I want to incorporate from the photos into the mural,” said Roman-Baxendale, who added he would likely use pictures of the boats, containers and cranes to represent human activities by the river.
“It will show how everything works in unison to bring our stuff to us,” he said.
Each student will work independently on a portion of the mural based on their respective classes. Seniors will cover human activities while juniors will work on wildlife, sophomores on plant life and freshmen on the water.
All the elements will be combined using various art media like paint, print, collage and fabric to create the mobile mural.
“In this way, all the partners in the project hope to educate the community on the way the river can be preserved while at the same time producing so much economic benefit and employment,” said Nancy Rubin, communication director for the Port Authority.
While the Port Authority has only 150 employees, activities at the terminals provide about 8,000 direct jobs, said Port Authority Community Outreach Manager Joanne Kazmierski.
As students sketched the scenery around them, or took pictures with digital and cell phone cameras, Kazmierski talked about commerce at the Blount Island Marine Terminal, which is technically a free trade zone outside the U.S. in international waters.
“You can stand on that side, but you can’t walk through without the proper identification,” she announced as the bus passed through a security checkpoint.
Kazmierski supplied the students with a plethora of background information to support the images they were seeing.
While passing cars destined for Turkey and the Middle East, she noted, “We are the second largest port in the U.S. for exporting vehicles…Six hundred thousand (vehicles) pass through the port each year.”
Sophomore Genevieve Bell lives along the St. Johns River, but the trip left her with a new appreciation for the important waterway.
“It’s cool how beneficial the river really is and how much they use the river,” she said. “I didn’t think it was that important.”
The mobile mural is scheduled for completion in February. The mural will be exhibited at the Jacksonville Main Library in the beginning of March and then at the Cummer Museum at the end of the March.
“With 150 kids, it’s a pretty major project to make a major work of art,” said Hope McMath, education director at the Cummer Museum. “Our hope is to change the attitudes of people in the city by using art as a communication tool and let people take away their own feelings about the river from it.”