When the glossed ponies of The Flying Horses Carousel in Oak Bluffs halt their whirling prance, the expressions of the children mounted atop their wooden backs sour. The ride is over. But for Island artist Sandy Bernat, the slowing spin of the merry-go-round on a bright day earlier this summer marked her moment.

As the riders slid down the saddles, Ms. Bernat rushed into the ring to snap a photograph of the bridled horse heads, hooves and mystic aesthetic of America’s oldest operating carousel.

From a batch of about 50, Ms. Bernat chose eight photos to digitally manipulate into images of phantasmic cyan and blue-toned horses bounding in a black expanse, free from the restraint of galloping with the front hooves of another horse at their heels.

“It’s as if the carousel is alive at night and the horses are off to other adventures,” she says.

Ms. Bernat printed each photo on its own page of handmade paper, sewn into an accordion pop-up book that opens into a four-foot photography display and clasps shut with a ribbon-strung brass ring.

This fanciful picture book is one of dozens of carousel-inspired pieces of art displayed in the gallery at the Featherstone Center for the Arts recently in a colorful and creative exhibit titled Carousel — The Art Before the Horse. Fifteen Island-connected artists from around the world contributed pieces in their preferred mediums to illustrate their unique interpretations of midway animals.

A statuette of two small turtles crawling across the black and gold-adorned cape of a speckled carousel frog greeted gallery visitors at the door. Along the showroom walls hung giraffe carnival figures etched in glass and black and white photographs of workmen dismantling a light-bulb-framed mirror from a portable merry-go-round. Candy-colored horses, a brass ring and a scrap of sheet music popped through layers of tinsel, lentils, tissue paper, stamps and etchings slopped in ink and pressed on an acrylic-coated mat board. The layers represented the countless coats of paint acquired by 100-year-old hand-carved carousel animals, painted and repainted to maintain an unsullied luster.

“The Flying Horses Carousel is a big part of the Martha’s Vineyard experience,” says exhibit curator Roberta Gross. “[The theme] just fits.”

But it was not the Island’s own historic showpiece of spinning, speared horses that inspired Ms. Gross to commission a carousel art exhibit. Rather, it was a man named Murray Zimiles and his observation that sparked a groundbreaking art exhibition of his own and an award-winning book: the horses, lions and deer carved into the walls of European synagogues look strikingly similar to the animals parading in endless rounds on the American carousel.

After 12 years of research in Eastern Europe, Israel and the U.S., Mr. Zimiles uncovered how a carved lion that countless children have mounted for a loop around the carousel at Coney Island in 1910 could possibly resemble so closely the open-mouthed lions guarding the Ten Commandments in a painted wooden carving that once adorned a Polish synagogue in the late nineteenth century.

The link, Mr. Zimiles discovered, is a Russian immigrant and master woodcarver named Marcus Charles Illions.

Mr. Illions immigrated to America as a skilled carver of Jewish folk art. In New York he encountered a city with too few synagogues in need of ornamentation and a culture that valued what a man could produce more than the reason behind its production. The men behind the amusements of Coney Island, in particular, were not concerned with the religious symbolism of Mr. Illion’s dazzling life-size animal carvings. In need of work, and now, with a new outlet for it, Mr. Illions unleashed his adept carving and creative design on the carousels of America.

“This is an immigrant story of one of the greatest carvers of this folk art who also carved the greatest carousel animals the world has seen,” Mr. Zimiles said, looking from sea blue eyes onto an audience of about one dozen huddled among the carousel art in the gallery.

Melding secular detailing with ritual symbols, Mr. Illions and many other Jewish folk art carvers immigrated to America and dressed its carousels with the stars and stripes of the States, glimmering glass jewels and even the Star of David.

In 2007, Mr. Zimiles, an artist and professor of art at SUNY Purchase, catalogued an unprecedented collection of American carousel animals alongside the ornate papercuts, gravestones and wood carvings of the Eastern European school of Jewish folk art that influenced them as a guest curator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

“The exhibition turned out to be the most popular exhibition in the history of the museum,” Mr. Zimiles says. “Not by a little bit, but double the attendance of any previous exhibition. It was an incredible success story.”

The images and the story behind the temporary exhibit are preserved in Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel, a Jewish Book Award-winning volume that documents Mr. Zimiles findings.

“It’s this whole crazy world of what happens when a religious immigrant comes to America to carve for these religious institutions and runs out of them very quickly,” Mr. Zimiles explains while fingering a pair of glasses hanging from around his neck. “What do you do with all those skills? He looks around, and there is Coney Island and he says, ‘Well, I can do that!’ And not only did he do it, but he did it on a level that the world had never seen.”