You're 150 – you can eat cake!
Students at the Hera Community School made a cake that will be displayed at the Red Soils campus
By Ellen Spitaleri
The Oregon City News, Feb 10, 2009
Kayla Simmons, a student at Oregon City’s Hera Community School, points out one of the waterfalls fashioned from blue glass that decorates the birthday cake students are making to celebrate Oregon’s 150th anniversary of statehood.
Ellen Spitaleri / Clackamas Review
Students and staff at the Hera Community School in Oregon City are giving the state a birthday cake in a very big way.
On Feb. 17, the cake, an elaborate, four-tiered mosaic affair that stands nearly 2-feet tall, will be installed in its permanent home inside the Clackamas County Public Services Building on the Red Soils government campus in Oregon City.
“The county was excited,” said Anna Meyrick, art teacher at the Hera Community School, adding that the Arts Action Alliance is sponsoring the project.
The colorful cake will “celebrate Oregon through the lens of Oregon City and the founding fathers,” she said, noting that the bottom of the cake “starts with older history and progresses up.”
The mosaics that make up each tier of the cake feature Oregon’s official colors of blue and gold, and waterfalls, representing rivers and lakes, are incorporated on one side of the cake in intense blue glass.
Meyrick said she was inspired to make the birthday cake by a poster of mosaic cakes celebrating the 12 signs of the zodiac.
“It was challenging to take a 2-inch picture as a model and make it into a reality. We took the photo and put it into a one-quarter inch grid, and we’ve been studying circumference and tying in a lot of math so as to build the cake and make it not too heavy,” she said.
Students at the community school, which opened last fall, have been focusing on Lewis and Clark’s journey and the Oregon Trail, among other things, Meyrick said, so that they could better understand Oregon History.
In addition to studying history and math, students in Carol Whitten’s English class are making a publication explaining all the symbolism of the colors, and detailing the process that went into making the birthday cake.
“The making of the cake is a nice tool to teach students about Oregon; it is a commissioned work with a real deadline,” Meyrick said, adding that she and the students visited all the historic places in Oregon City and talked to knowledgeable people about the state.
“I like the fact that the cake represents Oregon and its 150th birthday. And it was something to do for the community,” said Kassie Kiggins, 16.
There are 50 hooks around the bottom of the cake, and administrative assistant Carol Hohman has made charms indicative of Oregon’s culture to hang from each hook.
Meyrick is working on coming up with something special for the top of the cake.
She said, “It will reflect Oregon’s future and sustainability – the elements of sustainability that will reflect Oregon’s progress in the next 150 years.”
