Soaring through the night and defeating ne’er-do-wells with ease, LUNA, the Eclipse Superhero, is a 25-foot-tall inflatable sculpture meant to bring awareness and excitement to UCA’s eclipse-day events.
Gayle Seymour, associate dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication, said, “LUNA is a woman superhero and I know that if you really want to talk to kids and families and people of all ages, you’ve got to have a little bit of something that they already understand. Superheroes are the thing in all the films right now. If you go to the movies, it’s a superhero movie.”
In development for two years, LUNA was funded by NASA’s Arkansas Space Grant Consortium and the Arkansas Art Council.
“None of this just happens. It’s a lot of work,” Seymour said. “LUNA was incredibly complicated in terms of just making it happen and coming up with the idea and writing the grants and building the thing and deploying it.”
The project was a collaboration between UCA and alumnus Morton Brown, an independent art consultant and educator at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Brown said, “When Dr. Seymour talked about the needs they have around this particular event of the eclipse, that’s when we started kind of formulating together kind of what the construct of the project should be. So that’s when the idea of the inflatable kind of came out because she knew that I knew how to build those things.”
Although Brown received his bachelor of fine arts at UCA with an emphasis in painting, he has found himself working in the art world in ways beyond the brush.
Brown often helps conserve outdoor art, plans out the landscape work for art installations and works on commissions of public art. Brown has worked on a multitude of different projects involving city murals, steel statues and inflatable statues.
“I’ve just never been one to kind of back down from a challenge,” Brown said. “I’ve looked at each one of those opportunities as a learning experience. And I think that’s something that students ought to think about because that idea of lifelong learning that you gathered when you were a college student, it’s real.
“I’m sort of living proof of that. So if you’re in that mindset, and you just kind of live like that, you can make a living as artists, it just may not be the way that you envision,” he said.
Brown was excited to work on the project because of the fervent anticipation of the eclipse in Arkansas.
“Pittsburgh is not in the path of totality, but it’s going to still be 96 to 97 percent, and nobody’s talking about it. Nobody cares,” he said.
“This idea that Arkansas is getting this national and regional attention because it’s on the path of totality,” Brown said. “That just blew my mind. It’s cool for people to care about a natural phenomenon like this.”
Since stepping foot in Conway near the tail end of March, LUNA has traveled to a variety of places around the area, including Morrilton Middle School and Carolyn Lewis Elementary School.
“For the little kids in the elementary schools it just inspired awe and imagination right off the bat,” Brown said.
“They knew LUNA was coming, but they didn’t have any sense as to how big she was.”
Other locations that LUNA visited included Estes Stadium, Conway Art Walk and the Dog Barkanalia on eclipse day.
“An eclipse is such a rare thing that we have to take notice because we’re not going to be here when the next one comes,” Seymour said. “I’m not gonna be here at least. And I think an eclipse is a moment where we have the possibility to unite in the community. Because before minutes of totality, everything that we think about that worries us is all gonna go away. We’re all going to be thinking about the same thing, and it’s going to be very powerful.”
