The Senior Class Coordinating Board has teamed up with Providence City Arts for Youth, a local non-profit organization located at 891 Broad St. that runs after-school and summer programs in fine arts, to create a mosaic in South Providence.
Christopher Sha '06 was inspired to start this project after viewing similar public arts projects in his native Philadelphia, he said. Sha said he believes Brown students need to get off of College Hill, and he sees this project as a way to do that.
The tiles and design for the mosaic project will be created in a City Arts class led by senior volunteers this spring, and the mosaic will be installed on the north exterior wall of Compare Foods Supermarket on Broad Street over the course of three days.
The mosaic will cover about 100 square feet, leaving 1,400 square feet of the wall empty. Sha said this space is reserved for future senior classes, in hopes that they will add to the mosaic each year.
A continual effort
The initiative comes after years of Brown student involvement in the City Arts program.
Executive Director Barbara Wong described City Arts as a grassroots initiative to provide positive after-school opportunities for neighborhood kids free of charge.
"The arts are incredibly important," Wong said, noting that studying art can teach children critical thinking and self-expression skills. City Arts gives children access to the arts that they may not get elsewhere because of the erosion of art programs available to children in Providence's public schools, she said. City Arts reaches over 400 local children ages eight to 14 each year, she said.
City Arts provides kids with a "multidisciplinary arts experience," Wong said, with classes offered in visual art and design, performing arts and theater, music and creative writing. Classes meet twice a week during the school year, and there are two four-week summer sessions, she said.
The majority of classes at City Arts are in visual arts, where students learn about mask-making, puppet-making, painting, drawing, landscape, architecture and ceramics, Wong said. She added that class offerings vary based on the talents of artists hired by the organization.
Volunteers this year have faced a number of challenges stemming from the ongoing renovation of City Arts' Broad Street building, which began in October 2005. As a result, this year's classes have been held at a number of different sites throughout Providence. The renovated facility will be larger, with additional outdoor space, and will include visual art and dance studios, a digital media lab, library and gallery spaces, administrative offices, gardens and playgrounds. Wong said she hopes that classes will be back at the Broad Street location by January 2007.
In Wong's estimation, about six students from Brown and two to four from the Rhode Island School of Design have worked for City Arts this year as teaching assistants. "In terms of instructors, we have quite a few RISD alumni as faculty," she added. City Arts' staff is composed mostly of professional artists and certified art teachers from the community.
Some students work at City Arts on a volunteer basis, while others receive pay as part of the Federal Work-Study Program.
One such student is Shelley McDavid '08, who first got involved in City Arts as part of her work study program at Brown. Last semester, McDavid worked as a teaching assistant in a class at City Arts about murals, in which students used art to express the positive and negative aspects of their communities, she said.
Beyond a basic technical knowledge of drawing and painting, McDavid said, class projects "made (the children) think about their communities ... and approach (them) in an artistic way."
McDavid noted there were some challenging aspects to her work for City Arts. She said consistent attendance was the biggest problem, making it difficult to add to skills taught the week before and build relationships with the kids, she said.
Though McDavid enjoyed being involved in the community and working with local children, she will probably not work for City Arts again because of logistical difficulties like transportation and timing, she said.
Chloe Paisley '08 also worked as a teaching assistant for City Arts last semester and was involved in a class called "Off the Wall," in which students made comic strips about things they wanted to change in their neighborhoods, she said. The class was held at the West End Recreation Center. Paisley, a Portuguese and Brazilian studies concentrator, said she "really liked getting into the (Providence community and) biking through neighborhoods where signs are in Spanish and Portuguese."
Paisley's students often surprised her.
"(Some of the children) were surprised I didn't have a kid," she said. "(It was) really hard to control this batch of kids ... (but) it felt really good to be challenged," she said, adding that many of her students had longstanding relationships with City Arts through activities at their schools and public libraries.
Art-semiotics concentrator Isabelle Zaugg '06 started working for City Arts as a sophomore and has continued her work there this year after returning from a junior year abroad in Ethiopia.
"Sophomore year was a hard year. ... (City Arts was the) thing that got me through it," she said.
Zaugg has served as a teaching assistant for architecture, mask-making and comic-to-mural classes in the past. This semester finds her assisting a group of eight fourth- and fifth-graders in a puppet-making class at Providence's William D'Abate Elementary School.
Zaugg said her classes this year have been challenging, and she attributed discipline problems to the temporary location. Zaugg said she "really appreciates the philosophy City Arts is based upon," adding that they "don't fall into the trap of labeling kids good and bad."
While working in Providence schools independent of City Arts during her first year at Brown, Zaugg said she saw kids who were "alienated from what they were learning" and noted that City Arts lets students incorporate their own interests and cultures into their artwork.
"(This is) the kind of work I want to do throughout my life," Zaugg said.
