Monday, June 30, 2003
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ArtWorks: Working for our city and our youth
By
Alison Momeyer
It's 10 a.m. on a Tuesday and 15 students sit around a concrete table in Eden Park, sanding four pieces of wood, carefully fitted and nailed: the beginnings of a frame drum. Up the hill in a gallery inside Cincinnati Art Museum, the room is quiet but for the scratching of pencils moving quickly across thick sheets of paper, as writers and cartoonists sketch out drafts of what will become editorial cartoons. Over on Race Street, in the new offices of ArtWorks, the staff weaves deftly around piled boxes and overflowing desks, coordinating the latest summer of apprenticeships for Cincinnati youth.
This summer marks ArtWorks 8th year, and the program has grown from humble beginnings, working under tents in Eden Park, to a job-training program with corporate sponsors (including Time Warner Cable), a full office staff, program managers and a professional teaching staff. This year, there were over 300 applicants for 150 slots. ArtWorks employs youth ages 14-19-years old for six weeks to work on one of eleven projects in the arts. The apprentices, as they are called, are required to keep timesheets and expected to show up every day; this isn't camp. While it may be great fun, it's also a job, and the apprentices are expected to treat it as such.
Thom Shaw is a professional artist and printmaker who has shown his work across the country, and while his work hangs down the hall in a gallery at Cincinnati Art Museum, Shaw is the Project Manager for one of ArtWorks's newest programs: Editorial Ink. According to Shaw, students began the program with varying levels of skill and experience in creating editorial cartoons; some kids draw well, but aren't accustomed to putting words to their pictures; other students came is as writers, unused to working with visual artists to get their point across. But teamwork is a theme that runs throughout ArtWork's mission, and by next week, just their third week into the program, the apprentices will begin melding drawings with witty one-liners or succinct dialogue. "It's different to take all you want to say and put it in a quick read, "according to Shaw, who expects the cartoonists to move away from comic strips (where there is more space to tell a story) into single panels, as the program progresses.
Meanwhile, over at Seasongood Pavilion in Eden Park, the dialogue, echoed in the back and forth sanding of hand-crafted frame drums, is about origins and rhythm. Katheryne Gardette and Baba Charles Miller, known throughout the city as founders of Drums For Peace, run one of the original projects for ArtWorks. Gardette explains that they've stayed with it because they believe in the opportunity "for young people to work with established artists, to see the arts as the way for diversity and collaboration and inclusiveness to occur." Working with Drums for Peace, the students are learning about a wide range of drums from as far away as Puerto Rico, Brazil and Ghana; they have assignments to research specific types of percussion instruments at home, on the Internet, at the library. All the students seem to agree: at ArtWorks they learn things that interest them. As Apprentice Brooke Stacy puts it, "A lot of my friends work at Kroger's, stocking. This way I can learn something interesting instead of cleaning up in aisle 7."
In addition to the two projects described, apprentices are working at locations throughout downtown Cincinnati on the following projects: designing a large mixed media mural inspired by animals and their habitats at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens for Children's Hospital Hematology/Oncology Department; constructing masterpiece garden-style park benches; creating functional weathervanes to be used as outdoor sculpture; collaborating on an "unmural" for the new Contemporary Art Center; photographing downtown signage, graffiti and graphics for a book; making t-shirts and totes using photo transfers, beading and silk screening; crafting "Slugger Sculptures" as part of the Bats Incredible! public art event; producing video promotions for ArtWorks to be aired on television; and participating in a woodwind quintet with the College Conservatory of Music.
In all, it's an impressive array of projects for an organization in the business of effecting change through artistic development. It's this kind of collaboration, with teachers, artists, community professionals, and area businesses pulling together in support of youth, that makes our city shine.
On Tuesday, July 22, ArtWorks will host a gala to celebrate the summer program and give the public a first look at some of the finished projects created by the youth apprentices. There will also be an opportunity to purchase selected works. More information can be obtained by contacting ArtWorks: (513) 333-0388.
Alison Momeyer is a freelance writer working amidst the chaos produced by
her five-year-old daughter and three-year-old twin boys.
