The elementary art school in Havlíčkův Brod was founded as the Bedřich Smetana Music School in 1949. In 1961, it was renamed the People’s School of Art, and in 1969 it acquired the former 19th-century courthouse on Smetanovo Square. By the mid-1970s, however, it was clear that the school urgently needed new premises for its growing number of students and specialized classrooms. It was decided to build an extension on the south side of the historic building, facing Smetanovo Square, which was at that time the centre of new urban developments.

Glark Breda (1944–2008), designer at the Stavba production cooperative in Havlíčkův Brod, proposed a four-story building composed of a standardized modular reinforced-concrete skeleton, a system widely used at the time for public buildings such as schools, offices, and service facilities. The south facade was made of Boletice panels, while the other two facades were brick. The extension provided the missing space, but it also had its shortcomings, primarily the lack of continuity between the levels of the individual floors and the lack of passageways between the new and old parts of the building.

As early as 1979, Breda had planned artistic decoration in the form of a ceramic mosaic on the eastern facade, and had included a schematic representation of the mosaic in the project documentation. Jan Exnar (1951) and Hana Exnarová (1949) were commissioned to create the artwork. As a duo—a glass artist and a ceramicist—they determined the choice of materials: glass and ceramics, and in the end, instead of a mosaic, a three-dimensional sculpture was created.

The specific form of the work was subject to review and approval by the state commission for cooperation between artists and architects, which evaluated the aesthetic quality and political appropriateness of art for public spaces in accordance with the law.

The artists presented a design for a ceramic pencil featuring symbols of the various disciplines of the art school and a glass tip, executed with great precision and accompanied by graphic sheets by Jan Exnar, bearing embossed symbols of music, fine art, drama, and dance education. It was the convincing execution of the design that was crucial in it being accepted.

While the ceramic parts were made entirely by the artists in their own studio, the glass tip of the pencil was hand-turned on a pipe by experienced glassmakers Krajšek and Hejkal at the glassworks in Josefodol near Světlá nad Sázavou.

The extension to the People’s Art School was completed in 1982, and the sculpture was probably finished shortly afterwards, as evidenced by the final inspection report, which required the relocation of a lightning rod that prevented the artwork from being placed on the eastern facade of the extension.