Ms. Priya’s art project at South Fayette Township Library to honor mothers
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As Mother’s Day approaches, a local artist is bringing a touch of beauty to the South Fayette Township Library and looking for the community’s help to do it.
Selva Priya Sahadevan, known to her students as Ms. Priya, is a recipient of the Emerging Artist Scholarship from the Three Rivers Arts Festival, and she also teaches art classes to encourage young students. These students will be participating in the Mother’s Day event as well.
For the event, Priya and the South Fayette Township Library, with the help of Nicole Harding, the library’s children’s librarian, will be distributing rock-painting kits to community members. These kits will include small river rocks that families can paint however they like, with a motherhood theme.
These rocks will be collected and integrated into a rock mural that will be displayed for one week outside of the library. Then, they will be returned back to their creators so that they can be touching reminders of creativity, family bonding and community.
“It’s a community project, so we want to involve as many people as possible,” Priya said.
She, in partnership with the library, has been dedicated to bringing people together through art during the pandemic. “I only recently, over the pandemic, discovered how many of our wonderful patrons, children who were so active at the library, are also involved in Ms. Priya’s classes,” Harding said. “Ms. Priya has generously volunteered to teach some art classes, and the kids love the art classes.”
The South Fayette Library also has a newly-renovated outdoor patio space that they hope patrons will enjoy during this event. The patio space was finished around the time of the pandemic’s beginning, so many of the library’s previous visitors have not yet gotten to spend time there.
Several other community art projects spearheaded by Priya have helped South Fayette neighbors bond throughout covid-19. These events included making masks for frontline workers this past Valentine’s Day, and a driveway chalk art contest that was held last summer, for which Harding was a judge.
“When I agreed to be one of the judges for the chalk art, I saw all these children participating who were library patrons, and it warmed my heart,” Harding said.
One such student is Ishi. She and her sister have been taking classes from Priya for about a year, and they will be participating in the boulder painting outside of the South Fayette Library for the Mother’s Day event.
She is looking forward to participating. “I think it’s really cool and we can show people our art but we don’t have to actually be there,” she said.
She has big plans for her own contributions to the project. “I was actually thinking of maybe doing dolphins or birds caring for their babies or eggs,” she said.
Priya’s art is whimsical and thoughtful, but she also likes to work with natural materials. The juxtaposition of using river rocks in this project with a theme of motherhood in nature is important to her.
“I was thinking that we should do some kind of mural art celebrating any form of motherhood — mother nature, mother country, mother tongue. Involving nature along with motherhood goes hand in hand,” she said.
The rock mural and painted boulder rocks will be on display outside the South Fayette Township Library for all to enjoy the week of May 9, Mother’s Day. Harding hopes that all will come to interact with the art and outdoor library space, especially after the long haul of the pandemic, and Priya is hoping to encourage her students and the community to create art.
“It’s great for the receiver and the creator,” she said.