What happens when you add glue, cardboard, 130 young artists? This crazy KC tradition
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On a sloping lawn at the Kansas City Art Institute on Wednesday, some 130 2D artists took on a 3D challenge that, 28 years since its inception, has grown into a zany Kansas City tradition.
It’s officially called Rail Day, an Art Institute challenge that Steven Mayse, a professor of illustration soon to turn 78, started in 1996.
His students call it fun.
Glue plus cardboard. The challenge: to make a contraption, a one-passenger “craft” with cardboard wheels, that can be pulled down an 80-foot wooden rail track without collapsing. The style? These are Art Institute illustration students, limited only by their sculpture skills and imaginations.
They created a bear. A ladybug. A star. A sardine tin. There was a lotus flower, a Mountain Dew can and Smart Water bottle, a skateboard, puffin, pink Malibu Barbie car and “Jeff” the green reptile, with pink claws, created by sophomores Carly Burkholder, 20, of Overland Park and teammate Keira Eide, 19, of Milwaukee.
“He’s a Jeff-tile,” Eide said.
Pulled by classmates, with Burkholder seated inside, “Jeff” made it the full length of the rail. Burkholder tossed dandelions from her “swamp bouquet” of weeds as they scooted the craft down the incline.
“There you go,” Mayse said, as he helped sophomore Jaxson Sutter and partner Liberty Justice-Dean down the rail in their red … ladybug? Um, fire truck? Whatever. Forty feet along and Sutton fell to the grass.
The event has its serious side. Mayse devised Rail Day to force students ensconced in the world of two-dimensional illustration into the world of three-dimensional problem solving.
“I think 3D. They think 2D. So it was like, ‘I need to get them out of that rut,” Mayse said. “Because when they graduate, they’re going to be asked to do more than just 2D stuff.
“I had two students who this year said, ‘Do we have to do this?’ The answer is yes. A student asked me that n 2004. She did it, and then went to New York and got a job in an animation studio where she had to create dioramas every day for Nickelodeon. She emailed me and said, ‘I’m so glad I know about the strength of cardboard.’”
Mayse said that although the first Rail Day was in 1996, the event was held intermittently up until 2005, when the Art Institute decided to do away with the illustration program. In 2010, the program was resurrected. So was Rail Day. It’s been held yearly ever since.
Only about two-thirds of the crafts ever make it all the way down the rail without falling apart.
“I tell them,” Mayse said, “failure is part of the process.”
