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Spring Quarter Essay — March 2005

 

The Power of Art Starts With Our Children

His name was Ramón and he was a stubby 9 year-old with bright black eyes. He looked up at me in wild frustration from his blank piece of drawing paper. It was obvious he had little idea about drawing, much less how to make a picture about people getting along together, which was the assignment. So we sat together to talk it over.

Earlier on this gray winter day full of puddles, twenty of us from The Drawing Studio-artists, teachers, students-had come to the campus of the University of Arizona to meet 220 kids from the Boys and Girls Clubs of Tucson and coach them through an art project. The kids-all sizes and ages from 7 to 17, with a range of skin colors like the rainbow of mankind-had come to see the forty giant colorful bright panels of the Coexistence Exhibition* installed in open air in front of the campus fountain on the Mall.

Many of the kids in the Boys and Girls Clubs live in very tough life situations. Some have that look of 'older beyond their years'. But as I watched them walking from panel to panel, studying each artist's image about the many ways and difficulties of getting along together on our shrinking planet, they seemed unusually quiet and thoughtful, especially for kids on an outing. They were clearly engaged on every level: by the art, by the message, and had very quickly connected with this very abstract idea of coexistence.

After a bag lunch, we all trooped up some stairs and into the big ballroom of the Student Union (our host), today converted into an enormous art room, each table carefully set with paper and oil pastels ready for each child. With the help of a mike, I introduced our TDS 'art coaches', one to each table. I offered a few examples about how pictures and colors help us show things that words can't always reach. "Today," I said, "I want you to make your own poster about getting along together. Because I know," I continued "that each of you has an image from your personal life inside you that could be another Coexistence art panel. And if you can make a picture about it, you will help everybody to 'see' peace in the world more clearly. Your art has the power to change the world."

And with that everyone went to work, cheered on by the art coaches. Slowly across the ballroom appeared a sea of pictures--of bright red hearts, handclasps, flowers, a dragon (he's killing all the bad guys), a brick wall (each brick carefully rendered but in the middle cracking into two parts to show the word 'Love' inside), and a masterpiece by an eight year old girl of tenement buildings with windows full of flower boxes and a laundry-line of shirts strung between buildings with letters on each shirt spelling 'getting along together'.

But in many seats nothing was happening, like the10-year-old boy at a nearby table, pencil poised but puzzled about the very act of drawing anything. I was witnessing a lot of obviously bright children confronting the gap between the natural inner urge to participate and express themselves, and a total lack of connection with the language of drawing at even the simplest level of skill. A wave of sadness literally wrenched my heart, and in a kind of panic I went looking for every child sitting in that trance of inaction, using anything in my art teacher's quiver to get them drawing.

As the day came to a close, I calmed down and began to realize that all of us TDS volunteers were learning something about our work from these amazing kids because, while we teach mostly adults at TDS, we often joke that teaching adults to draw is remedial education, given that drawing is a basic skill of communication that should have been in place as children, just like reading and writing. Today was a body blow realization of what 'disadvantaged' looks like, and what the emotional cost is, when access to the language of art is missing in children.

Curiously, the experience left me full of resolve about the future of The Drawing Studio and our struggle to let go of our origins as a congenial artists club in order to respond to the interest in art participation that keeps flowing our way. We really need to wake up at TDS, I thought, to get organized, get clearer, louder, and tougher in broadcasting our real mission as advocates for the practice of art as basic to every stage in life, and especially to our children.

Ramón waved me over to his table. He had drawn two little figures, one on each side of the page with a line in the middle. "This is two people coming apart when they were together before," he said. "I want you to write that, in cursive please, on the bottom." I did. Then he took his pastel sticks and made one side of the paper blue, the other pink. It was his first work of art. He said I could have it if I would scan it into my computer and send it out to people.

It was time to leave. Many of the 220 kids wanted to say goodbye to us, or thanks, or something. A small girl, the last in line to file out, lingered behind. With a little pause she asked, in a small voice, "Could I please have a box of the colors to take home?"

©2004 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission

 

*for more information on The Coexistence Project, go to http://www.theinnerconnection.org/