TURNING TEN
COMMUNITY ARTS PARTNERSHIPS (CAP) CELEBRATES TEN YEARS
For the past ten years, CCS’ Community Arts Partnerships (CAP) has provided Detroit area youth with access to visual art education in safe, positive environments. More than 4,000 youth take part in CAP projects annually. One such project is the collaboration with the Neighborhood Services Organization (NSO). Under the auspices of NSO, a class of developmentally disabled students was paired with high school-age interns from CAP’s Detroit Neighborhood Corps program. During two weeks in July, students and interns learned the importance of public art with some guidance from experts.
An art educator, art therapist a well-known muralist and a youth development consultant helped students create a mural that incorporated a heart, hands, stars, people, a rainbow, hone, sun and the American flag. This mural now lives on the NSO building wall at 8600 Woodward Avenue, just north of the CCS Taubman campus.
This project is one example of the type of work CAP regularly does in the Detroit community. “CAP’s mission is not only to collaborate with Detroit community organizations to create art and design education, experiences, and resources for local youth and families in support of individual and community development, but also to inspire young people to make and keep the visual arts part of their lives,” says Richard L. Rogers, president of CCS.
Interns involved with the NSO project for their creative start through CAP’s programs and built connections with teachers and artists over the years. Connections ran deep enough that a number of students decided to pursue a career in arts.
One of those interns is incoming CCS freshman Fatima Sow. She participated in CAP programs and now is excited about her future career as a fine artist. She credits CAP’s educators with developing her passion and skills to be an artist. “Especially with the artists who have been mentors, it definitely helped me to think outside the box and not be limited,” said Sow.
Director Mikel Bresee has seen the CAP program’s impact on the overall community and also has seen the organization evolve. “Working with art helps people understand their world, themselves, the connection between themselves and the world, and it helps them to express what they’ve discovered,” he said.
The idea of the CAP program was to create an opportunity for young students that don’t have easy access to art in their communities. Bresee explained that there are man Detroit neighborhoods without art centers or art galleries and many Detroit students never get an opportunity to see the potential art has in the world. While this is a common situation in many Michigan neighborhoods, it is further exacerbated by the cuts in Detroit Public School’s (DPS) arts programming.
Today, CAP serves 4,000 students each year with programs for young people from first grade to high school. The entry-level students who walk in for art lessons receive a minimum of six to eight weeks of after-school sessions.
Within the first four years of the program, these students had started making an impact as artists, but as they moved up to middle school there was no art education from the school and lacked art-related resources in the community. At the end of the program, there was nowhere to go. So six years ago, CCS approached the Skillman Foundation and developed a new program that allows these students to take their talents to the next level.
From this, the Detroit Neighborhood Art Workshops, with locations in the communities of Brightmoor and Osborn, was established. The workshops became a more focused program for the weekend and were the first to be specifically targeted for youth development, partnering with social services and youth development professionals.
The next step in CAP’s mission was to enable students to make a positive and tangible contribution to their community. With the help of Skillman, CAP came up with a new program called Detroit Neighborhood Art Corps. This program is geared toward high school students who reach an advanced level in visual arts. Artistically, the program has students painting murals, sculpting and cleaning the community to make it more inviting.
CAP and Skillman wanted to take this one step further and created an adult program that could interact with the students who graduated, allowing them to work directly with experienced artists to develop public art in Detroit communities. The community+public arts: Detroit program was established, thus bringing area children’s artistic journey to completion.
“From the first time a student gets a taste of art in elementary school, all the way through middle school where they begin developing their portfolios to their high school years where they now start working with community leaders and professional artists doing large-scale very high quality pieces, they get immersed in art and begin to see themselves as pursuing careers in the art and design world,” said Bresee.
Larry Lunsford, a youth development consultant, who has been working for CAP for the last seven years, believes art is the number one thing that can direct creative energy toward productive careers. He is especially proud that four of his students will be attending the University of Michigan after being involved in numerous CAP programs. “We just wanted to kick start them,” Lunsford said. “But it became something much larger and now the lessons they’ve learned with CAP will carry on forever.” – Ruchi Naresh