Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
We all know those vending machines at the entrance to the grocery stores. For a couple of quarters you can buy a sticker, a spider ring or bouncy ball. It was so much fun to put your money into the machine and have your prize pop out, ready to be enjoyed.
Taking that same concept – and machine – in mind, printmaker Caroline Hertko decided to make art accessible and fun by filling a vending machine with business card sized Appalachian themes prints.
“This is not an original idea,” she said. “There are other art vending machines out there, and I was very inspired by the culture of different things you can put in them. I wanted to make it my own and have an Appalachian theme of the vending machine.”
Hertko applied for and received a grant from the West Virginia Department of Culture, Arts and History to purchase three vending machines for her prints. One of those machines is now located in the Rivertown building in Marlinton.
For the machine, Hertko created 18 small prints in her Appalachia series and gives the secret to collecting them all.
“They come out at random, but if you use the same slot, they’re in order – one through eighteen – so if you’re trying to collect them all, stick to the same slot,” she said, laughing.
The machine has three slots and can hold 500 prints at a time. For this series, Hertko said she printed 3,000 of the business card size prints.
“I think I was starting with a dozen [designs] and then it ended up – it’s kind of funny – on the block of linoleum I was carving, eighteen just fit and I had all of these ideas,” she said. “I was really whittling them down, so I was a little impulsive and used them all.”
A second machine is located at the Wild Bean in Lewisburg and Hertko is keeping the third to have with her at fairs and festivals.
Hertko said she is excited to have the machines out in the public and says that the project has become more than just a fun way to collect art.
“It’s partially a public art piece because making an individual piece of art for one dollar is not incredibly sustainable and so part of it is a grant-funded public art piece,” she said. “I’m really excited to do this, and I’m hoping they’ll be here for the minimum of six months and then I may come up with a different series and location.
“Most people can come up with four quarters to do something fun, and it makes it really accessible,” she continued. “Not everybody can buy an expensive oil painting or an expensive sculpture, but it just helps art to be a little more accessible and to make it a little more casual and approachable.”
The print designs include: a fall leaf, morrell mushroom, mountain laurel, rocking chair, mountain bike, ramps, a banjo, mason jar, black bear, cabin, trout, Mothman, ginseng root, firefly, cast iron skillet, canoe, camper and radio telescope.