What do the OKCity Museum of Art and the Wildlife Expo have in Common?

The Alex Gifted, Creative, and Talented Students can answer that.

For their two field trips this semester, GCT students first attended the Department of Wildlife’s Expo 2008 which allows Oklahomans to celebrate our great state’s natural diversity and opportunities for sporting enthusiasts.

It is the state’s largest indoor and outdoor recreation event and held at the Lazy E Arena at Guthrie.

People are never too old to try something new-visitors could shoot a bow and arrow, saddle a mule, paddle a kayak, ride a mountain bike or climb a rock wall. Seminars taught students how to do basket weaving with native grasses, spin, reel, and fly fishing, how to trail your dog, whether it is a retriever, pointer, or just a hound to hunt and retrieve game or just to be a well-manned member of the family.

Other reasons to attend the Expo were seeing how bats and falcons are helpful to our environment in maintaining good conservation practices, and two-words: fried catfish. Other foods available for tasting were turkey jerky and bison chili, while standing inside an enclosed canopy with hundreds of butterflies around you was just plain “cool.”

Going from one extreme to another, GCT students made their next stop this fall at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art to view the exhibit Roman art on loan to them from the Musee’ Du Louvre in Paris consisting of 184 ancient artifacts of Roman history including sculptures, busts, ceramics, mosaics and jewelry.

The exhibits were displayed by themes, including religion, urbanism, war, imperial expansion, funerary practices, intellectual life and family. The exhibit traces the genealogy of the four most important families in Roman history: Julio-Claudians, the Antoines, the Severans and the Constantine family. These families covered a the time period from the first Century B.C. through the early fourth century A.D.

Through the arts, the concept of citizenship is portrayed, and features socio-economic conditions of the people, their hairstyles, clothing, jewelry, perfume bottles and funeral urns and sarcophagi and household objects. Maps and paintings demonstrated the vastness of the empire and the 250,000-seat Circus Maximus where all sporting events took place.

After completion of their tour of the Romans, students were also able to see the 200-piece glass collection the Oklahoma City museum purchased from world-renowned glass-blower (luminist) Dale Chihuly. His work in the museum is The Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower, commissioned as a blown glass architectural piece in the lobby that stands 35 feet high and explains why he is considered the most brilliant figure to work in glass since Louis Comfort Tiffany.