by Victor Maldonado
Photos: Chloe Dietz, PNCA, ’13
Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) faculty members Arvie Smith and Barry Sanders and a band of PNCA students bring the transformative power of creative practice to incarcerated teenagers.
Over the last year, the empowerment of creative work was taken beyond the PNCA campus in two separate projects aimed at inspiring incarcerated youth. On the street, the location of the work by PNCA students and faculty members is called “juvie.” Officially, it’s the Donald E. Long home, Multnomah County’s Juvenile Detention Center, where teens arrested in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties arrive in handcuffs....
For the last year and a half, PNCA Painting Department faculty Arvie Smith has been busy executing a public art mural project in the Donald E. Long Detention Center. The unusual project came about through a commission from Regional Arts & Culture Council with funding from Percent for Art through the construction of the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice Detention Facility in 1995. Smith has worked in residence, engaging with the teenage inmates while working in his masterful social surrealist style. In the panels, Smith’s figurative abstraction creates enlightened compositions that are direct and poetic in their themes.
“Hope is at the heart of the compositions,” says Smith. For the incarcerated teens, hope represents the culmination not just of Smith’s skillful hands but also his ability to model the kind of creative practice that could mean a permanent way out of institutions like Donald E. Long.
0 comments:
Post a Comment