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When John Acorn <\/span>was in elementary school, he and his classmates would get their graded tests back from their teachers every Friday so that they could take them home and share them with their parents. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> John Acorn in his studio with the original wooden model.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div> \u201cI have to admit I was a very good student,\u201d he laughs. \u201cI loved going to school, so I had no reason to dispose of [my tests].\u201d But that wasn\u2019t the case for all of Acorn\u2019s friends. On the walk home from school Friday afternoon, \u201cthe guys \u2014 mostly guys since the girls were brighter than the boys \u2014 would fold their tests into paper airplanes because they weren\u2019t going to take them home to show their parents, that\u2019s for sure,\u201d Acorn says. \u201cWe lived on a street which backed up onto a cemetery, and as we would walk home up the hill, the guys would zip their airplanes over the fence into the cemetery.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n This lighthearted childhood memory was the inspiration behind \u201cFriday Flyers,\u201d the name of the six oversized, aluminum paper airplanes scattered across Clemson\u2019s campus. Some are easy to spot, while others lie half-hidden. The planes were originally part of a larger art project Acorn was developing in 1996 when he was the chair of the art department at Clemson.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cJim Barker was the dean of the College of Architecture when I was with the art department,\u201d Acorn says. \u201cAlong with a number of other people, he was very interested in having artwork on campus. Art in public places was a very hot issue a couple of decades back when the National Endowment for the Arts was sponsoring projects all over the United States.\u201d The original project included various objects related to childhood that would be placed all over campus, but when it wasn\u2019t feasible financially, Acorn suggested stripping the project down to the paper airplanes.<\/span><\/p>\n Each airplane\u2019s location and position on campus is as if it were thrown from the Hendrix Student Center, \u201csort of landing as if they just by chance earned that place.\u201d As a remnant of Acorn\u2019s own childhood, the paper airplanes represent the transition between youth and adulthood, symbolizing themes like chance, discovery and progress.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThey indicate the idea of leaving behind your early years, and now you\u2019re off to something brand new and exciting \u2014 you know, the college experience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> When John Acorn was in elementary school, he and his classmates would get their graded tests back from their teachers every Friday so that they could take them home and share them with their parents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":19357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[243,1323,1669,2190,2770,2777],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-19366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landmarks-legends","tag-art","tag-friday-flyers","tag-john-acorn","tag-paper-airplane","tag-summer-2018","tag-summer-2018-landmarks-legends"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/06\/Friday_Flyers_johnacorn.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19366"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=19366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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