Each student spent six hours a day working on their designs for five days. (Giselle Rhoden / LPM)On a small runway at the Kentucky International Convention Center, 16-year-old Allison Sorg dons pointed-toe shoes, baggy, wide-leg shorts and a long, dark brown and purple cape.The cape sways behind h er as she walks the runway. An audience of her peers shower her with applause, praising pieces made from the upholstery of an old couch.Earlier this summer, Louisville Visual Arts’ Art in Motion program taught middle and high school students how to recycle discarded fabric, newspaper and other materials and transform them into “trashion.”The free, four-week program teaches students how to work with different mediums under the guidance of local artists. Each week, the young artists would spend six hours a day drawing with Richard Sullivan, creating collage art with Lance Newman, oil painting with Tomisah Lovely Allen and learning fiber arts with Sarah Jane Castellon.“The idea is to really show these kids that they have talent, they can grow their work, and they could potentially have a career path out of this if they wanted to,” said Louisville Visual Arts executive director Angela Hagan.This was the first time Sorg used oils, paint markers, and more than one sewing machine.“We had access to a lot of stuff we wouldn't have access to otherwise,” she said.During the week focused on fiber art, Sorg sewed together pieces of an old couch to craft the baggy shorts she wore during the fashion show. She said she modeled her outfit after the Renaissance period.Allison Sorg said she got her idea for her design from Pinterest. (Giselle Rhoden / LPM)“I wanted to make a cloak sort of thing that I was gonna wear to like Renaissance fairs, and I wanted it to have a ridiculously long hood and be floppy and wiggly,” Sorg said. 17-year-old Savannah Hellems, a Floyd Central High School senior, spent her design week experimenting with scraps of newspaper.“I began twisting it. I started wrapping them together and started forming a nest out of it,” she said.This twisting and wrapping became a papier-mâché bird sitting in its nest. Hellems wore her work as a headpiece on the runway."I really liked messing around with all the different materials because it was all upcycled, like there was a lot to choose from," Hellems said. (Giselle Rhoden / LPM)“For the bird, I built this wire frame and then wrapped the entire thing in tape, and then ended up cutting out all the feathers individually and gluing them all on,” she said. “There was a lot of hot glue that went into it, too.”The fashion show was held during InstructureCon, an annual conference that supports education technology for educators and students. Instructure, a leading educational tech company and founder of learning management system Canvas, awarded Louisville Visual Arts a $50,000 grant to run its Arts in Motion program.“We believe that the role between students and educators is super important, and the idea of creating something and amplifying and finding your spark is so central to what education is all about,” said Instructure chief customer officer Rachel Orston.Hellems, from Floyd County, said it’s challenging to find other students that value art as much as she does.“At school and stuff, you're around like maybe a handful of people that really enjoy art, and then everybody else is just there to take the class.”Sorg is the only student in her fiber arts class at New Albany High School. She said she has tried to convince her friends to join, but it hasn’t always worked out.“I'm lonely in there,” Sorg said. “We had one student for the first semester that was also in there with me. We became pretty good friends, but she abandoned me for her personal finance classes.”Sorg and Hellems both said the program introduced them to like-minded people who they might not have met otherwise.“It was also really fun to sit and bounce ideas off of the other people in the class, and kind of expand on your idea that you started out with, and then it takes you to like this place that you didn't think you were even gonna go,” Hellems said. ...read more read less