BETHEL SCHOOL DISTRICT — Parents, students and staff recently gathered at Liberty Middle School to honor the school for its School of Distinction award, as well as to formally dedicate the public art project that graces its entryway.

Liberty Middle School is the first middle school in the Bethel School District to receive the School of Distinction award, and is one of only 24 in Washington State to achieve that honor.

The school’s public art project was also officially dedicated. Entitled Illuminated Passage, the artwork consists of 300 square feet of die painted silk. The eleven, brightly colored panels are suspended off the wall by stainless steel brackets and accented by a light effect that looks like sunlight reflecting off of a rippled water surface.

“The theme is a river moving through a canyon, as the students are like a river moving through adolescence and these middle school years,” said Steven Scheibe, the artist behind Illuminated Passage.

Seeing his work on the wall at Liberty Middle School was actually a first for Scheibe. “It’s amazing! The first time I actually saw all the panels together was when it was up on the wall. My studio is not big enough to hold it all flat side by side. So I had to do it in sections and hold the adjacent parts like puzzle pieces to make sure it would work!”

Scheibe said the students were equally excited about the project, “A few of them came back to me and said, ‘This is really beautiful, thank you so much!’”

If you’d like to learn more about the story behind this striking piece of artwork, you can visit Scheibe’s website at http://www.visibleinvisible.com/pages/commission/hand-painted-silk/bethel-school-district-2011-12/making-of-more.php