Sadie Green, 10, paints decorations on the fins to go with her paper plate fish during the Sedalia Parks and Recreation Department’s  Art in the Park activity on Tuesday at Convention Hall in Liberty Park. She and nine other kids spent the morning in the comfort of air conditioning making colorful fish, butterfly-decorated snack bags, and clay and plaster stepping stones.

Nina Freed is no novice when it comes to entertaining and preparing hors d’oeuvres for large parties. She created the menus and did the decorating for the members’ parties while her husband, Doug, was the director of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art at State Fair Community College.

Nadia Ostapenko, a fifth-grader at Sedalia Middle School, left, gives Carolyn Sperry, a Daum Museum of Contemporary Art docent, her interpretation of the symbolism in “Generals,” a mixed-media collage by Lupus Garrett that spans two walls in the Douglas Freed Gallery. About 125 fifth-graders divided into five groups were at the museum Tuesday and, with the guidance by docents, were given the opportunity to view and comment on five different art pieces on display at the museum as part of a Visual Thinking Strategies program. “It’s great fun, they went beyond the obvious,” Sperry said. “Their interpretations are wonderful,” she said.

Heber Hunt Elementary School students learned a little about art, a little about language and a little about diversity during a field trip Friday to the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art.

Revving it up

John Northington, a Kansas City, Mo., sculptor, right, installs his sculpture, "Untitled Concrete Round", in Liberty Park Wednesday morning with the help of Kansas City Art Institute senior Ben McCullough, left, and a crane from W&M Welding. The installation is part of the Art in the Park program , now in its third year, in which sculptures are loaned to Sedalia for a year by artists. Ten sculptures were installed at Liberty Park, the Municipal Building, the Liberty Center and Bothwell Regional Health Center. Three of them belonged to Northington.

The Camp Blue Sky campers gathered in a painting class were all using the same models — black eyed Susans and a purple flower in red plastic cups — but their pictures were wildly different.

A friendship between a young man from Kenya and a Sedalia woman has resulted in a church outreach to a slum village half a world away.

Art Impressions Gallery & Framing is currently displaying work by Best of Missouri Hands artists Donald and Blenda Marquardt.