While Jonathan Barnes spends his days creating and teaching art, he is creating a different kind of product during the coronavirus pandemic.
After speaking with a friend of his who is an emergency room physician in Ocala, and spoke of how badly staff members were in dire need of masks, Barnes did some digging.
He found a design for a face shield from the 3D printing company in the Czech Republic and began getting to work on his personal 3D printer. But he soon upped it to include two printers from St. Petersburg College Clearwater campus, where he is the chair for the Humanities and Fine Arts department.
"The idea of making things is super important," he said. "And I've been an educator 15, 16 years and it's really cool working with young people and teaching them creative problem solving through art. All the professors give students open-ended problems — it's giving them a pencil or clay or whatever material, say, 'Here's the problem we're trying to solve with these materials. The whole process of art making is creating things and solving the problem at hand."
He has now made more than 30 masks, donating to friends or friends of friends in the medical field in Clearwater, Orlando, Tampa, St. Petersburg and even Texas.
"This is what I can do — I'm happy to help," he said. "If you're a medical professional right now those are the front-line heros and they don't have what they need, which is crazy."
Barnes also plugged his work on a local Facebook group and now has others creating their own masks and dropping them off to Barnes to deliver to health care professionals.
"One of my son's classmate's dad is into printing, so they made eight to 10 and dropped them off, another random guy I met on Facebook dropped off eight and I'll have more tomorrow," he said. "I put a box in front of my fence and said to set them there, which feels kind of weird but I don't want to shake their hand (during this time of social distancing). It's been really helpful and high quality."
Barnes planned on creating the masks until he ran out of material, but another local from social media recently donated more material for Barnes.
"None of us are getting compensated from this, but it's pretty cool," he said. "It's definitely giving me something to do. It's a really cool cross of art and design and science and it's great to bring something positive to the community."
