Northwest artist Bob Leverich stood in the cold rain last Thursday afternoon, camera in hand, ready to snap photos of a public art sculpture installed on the grounds of Vashon High School just a few hours earlier.

“That’s my baby,” he said, with a broad grin slowly emerging from beneath his wet hood. “It’s called ‘Way of Knowing.’”

While hardly a baby — weighing in at double-digit tonnage — “Way of Knowing” is indeed Leverich’s brain-child and creation. The Olympia-based artist was chosen in 2016 by a Vashon High School (VHS) selection committee to create a piece of public art from a grant administered by the Washington State Arts Commission.

Only this wasn’t just any old grant.

“It was the largest grant ever given to a K-12 school in the history of the arts commission,” VHS Principal Danny Rock said.

The $135,000 award came from the state’s Art in Public Places (AIPP) program, which facilitates the acquisition, placement, and stewardship of artwork in state-funded building projects throughout Washington. Established in 1974, AIPP acquires artwork through grants for K-12 public schools, colleges, universities and state agencies and is funded by one-half of 1 percent of the state’s portion of construction costs, according to the AIPP website.

The VHS grant would not have happened, Rock said, without the assistance of islander Carrie Van Buren. Van Buren, who had previously worked with Vashon Center for the Arts’ program Vashon Artists in Schools, spearheaded the project and wrote the grant, with help from Pam McMahon. While many factors went into the proposal, Van Buren said she did “leverage the community strength of Vashon Allied Arts (now Vashon Center for the Arts) and the artists in the schools program to show how we could successfully manage the project.”

“She wrote the application, and we got the grant, so this is the initial efforts of Carrie Van Buren,” Rock said.

Grant awarded, the next step was to connect with a facilitator from the arts commission and form a selection committee. Along with Van Buren and Rock, the committee included VHS art teacher Terry Swift, student Tess Mueller, artists Penny Grist and Janice Mallman, Vashon School District (VSD) board member Dan Chase, Superintendent Michael Soltman and Capital Facilities Director Eric Gill, whom Rock said was a significant contributor and is reflected in the project.

“The committee met for about six to eight months,” Rock said about the process of distilling the intention for the sculpture. “We wanted whatever went into the space to reflect elements of Vashon and the Northwest and that would complete the building. We wanted people to be able to sit on it, touch it and be interactive, but we also wanted (the symbolism) to be subtle.”

All the artists the committee reviewed had to be registered with the arts commission. While the committee hoped to find a Vashon artist, those on the roster were primarily painters or did not have experience with the scale of the project.

“We worked really hard to stay true to the design parameters the team created and let that guide our selection instead of picking an artist and letting them guide the design,” Rock said.

After an initial false start with one artist, the committee unanimously landed on Leverich.

“He had done a large public works piece in Maine, and we really liked it,” Rock said. “He was willing to take that same design and expand on it. It is an expansion on the root of the word education, and it dealt with the idea of a launch, which is our goal — to launch our students into the world well prepared — so it reflects an element of that.”

Leverich explained that root of the word means to educe or draw out.

“I like to think of education as drawing out instead of cramming in,” he said. “I also wanted to make a piece that students could move through and around.”

Leverich chose to work with three granite slabs sourced from the Cascade Mountains and a glacial erratic, which he split in half, from a gravel pit east of Covington.

A crane lifts elements of new sculpture into place at VHS. (Courtesy Photo)

“I spent days searching through the boulders,” he said. “Even with so many, there was only one right one. The stone weighed 16 to 17 tons. It had to be split in the field, and then I carved out the openings (in the center of each half).”

The carved-out centers look a bit like hearts, but the artist said he thinks of the shape as a bean and deliberately chose it because he wanted the shadow made from the tongue that hangs down inside “to cast a meandering line like the shape of the horizontal slabs,” he said. “The three slabs represent a meandering path or way of knowing, a roadway, pathway or seaway.”

An artist, architect and sculptor, Leverich has also taught sustainable design, woodworking and other three-dimensional art forms at Evergreen College for the past 18 years. Seven students helped him with the project — “so it was an educational piece for them,” — using grinders with diamond blades to fret-cut the stone, diamond-cut saws and pads to polish it, and a brush-hammer on the outside of the boulder to pulverize the surface and bring out the color of the granite. With a single-pointed chisel, Leverich also used pointing, an ancient technique of Egyptian sculptors

Leverich, who had a show at Vashon Center for the Arts Koch Gallery this past summer, did a lot of research about the island for his piece.

“Kim Goforth gave me a tour. I went to the historical society and read up on the island and various communities that have been here since early 1800s,” he said. “I thought about the Japanese culture here and the student who was to be valedictorian but never graduated in 1942, as he was sent to the camps. I think of it in spirit — it’s not my place to borrow from other cultures, but I hope the piece reflects some of that. It was a privilege to work stones at this scale.”

Until the winter rains abate and the sun returns, the rocks will remain on their muddy mound, which rises 18 inches above the ground. But the plan is to plant a mixture of grass and tiny daisies to cover the area situated on the southwestern corner of the building. A dedication will be held in the spring, once the grass fills in.

“We wanted to delay the dedication until the site looks more like it should,” Rock explained. “It will be a grassy triangle, an ideal space as walkways circumscribe it. It will be the main outdoor space for students, aside from the courtyard.”

While the three horizontal pieces represent meandering paths for Leverich, they are like rays of sun for Rock. As for the students and islanders who will soon see and move around the new installation, “Way of Knowing” will no doubt draw out or eduse meaning for each and everyone.