The Power of Art: Imagining a Way Forward

Birthing a healing art program for young people

Community Art Leaders was born out of a collaboration with Milwaukee Christian Center through their youth development program, Youth Artists United. Their program helps young people develop self-confidence, collaboration and communication skills through working with an artist-in-residence. The year was 2018. This time, rather then focus on studio art, they wanted to offer their target neighborhood, Muskego Way and its community partners a chance to do a community mural. So they reached out to me.

The traditional length of their program was 14 weeks, way more time than I was accustomed to on any normal mural project, where residents would participate in a few visioning sessions and community paint days. This provided an opportunity for more to happen with the young people I'd be working with - but the question came up in me as to what I'd be doing with them. 

How would I fill the time? I figured, well, they need to learn what we're going to do, first. Beyond that, I wasn't sure how to fill the time. Maybe we could do some of the team-building games I'd learned over the years as filler activities? But like any project I wanted everything we do to have a purpose towards the overall goal of the project, which was to paint a mural with community input.

How would we do that? How could I get a group of young people to do art the way I had grown accustomed to doing art? Why would I get a group of young people to do art the way I do it? 

I'd already spent years experimenting with different things to developing a system and method that I felt worked. I imagined a group of young people interested in art would want to develop their own approach or ideas. I thought they'd rather be spontaneous and rebellious and counter the status quo. I knew I wasn't interested in teaching traditional drawing and painting technique - I wanted to do more. The original name of the program, Youth Artists United, was about youth development through art, not through a specific medium or approach. An artist could do with it as they wished as long as it helped with those goals of confidence-building, self-esteem, and collaboration.

I had my doubts. Would they even be interested at all in what I had to offer? Wouldn't they rather figure out their own way of doing a community mural?

Throughout the years, I've questioned what's so unique about my method of community art. People have expressed a profound impact their participation has on them. Even the ones who hadn't been directly involved were affected by looking at the the images, saying they felt it benefited them and their community. The mural project Sherman Park Rising is a good example of that, but I was still digesting what that meant and what made it so successful.

The journey of accepting that my work could have a lasting impact and make a difference has been a long and difficult one. When I experienced depression, isolation and self-doubt growing up, as soon as I picked up a pencil or brush I felt better. My journey has been one of self-acceptance. It's about setting aside self-judgement and discovering limiting beliefs we have about ourselves and others.

Don't we all have that? What if I could help young people on their journey using the same tools that worked for me on mine? That's what brings us together - our commonalities. So I decided to offer those tools as a foundation - exercises designed to help with self-discovery; creating a sense of community through team-building games; sharing my philosophy experientially and through films; using talking circles to make room for sharing different perspectives without judgement.

Throughout the years, over the course of the program one thing I discovered is - there is a philosophy that guides the method; there are principles underlying how it works - and as it turns out, the true spirit of why we do art does not die.

Truly, the art became a form of expression that solidly harmonized different perspectives that could lead to disarray; they were led into a canal designed to quench the dry soil's thirst for those very things that heal. Like liquid heart, pure and simple and caring; the blends of color being the potential; and the background of the wall being the community. 

So now in our work that potential springs forth inundating the area, the environment around it, nurturing springs forth. Tears of joy swell; people share about it, talk, interact amongst themselves. They are neighbors. We are a song. A song of beauty, of joy, of relaxation. We help, we heal, we sing together. Our notes are pure song harmonious.

Laughter lifts into the air, carrying with it the breeze of delight, a single sound, a note lost in its bliss. The tail of a kite anchors it steady. Our roots give direction to flight, grounding our perceptions and thoughts into reality. What once was imagination becomes real. All that we resisted existing comes to be; everything we feared could not belong, belongs.