Practitioners of Healing Art

AU Grad Student, Homeless Men Unite to Create Shelter Mural

Joey Tomassoni, left, and Central Union Mission resident Michael Smith work on the mural created at the shelter by residents and Tomassoni, who organized the project as part of his master's degree. The mural's themes: food, shelter, education and worship. (By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)

The small art studio on the campus of American University was packed with graduate students and art professors, all waiting for 25-year-old Joey Tomassoni to present his master's project.

Tomassoni was nervous. He had just sat through the critiques of two other students, during which the professors were alternately intrigued, skeptical and disapproving.

Phillip Peace was in the room as well. Peace, a father of twin boys, lives at the Central Union Mission homeless shelter at 14th and R streets NW after more than two decades of drugs and petty crime. He listened as Tomassoni explained how he had painted a mural at the 130-bed shelter with the help of Peace and other residents.

But was this really art, one professor urgently wanted to know.

"The art for me becomes the act of interacting with other individuals . . .," Tomassoni explained. "The art is in the organizing and collaborating."

"That's teaching," the professor said.

"I consider that art," Tomassoni replied.

Tomassoni, a native of Bowie, has traveled to South America to paint murals. But for his master's project in fine arts, he wanted to do something closer to home that involved others -- perhaps even people who were not trained artists.

He called several D.C. shelters before he found David O. Treadwell, executive director of Central Union Mission. It is privately run and has a mandatory Christian component that includes nightly chapel and a drug recovery program steeped in religion.

Treadwell told Tomassoni he could paint a mural with the residents as long as it was Christian-focused and uplifting. "We always want to show these guys hope," Treadwell said.

But when the artist arrived in April to spend a weekend at the mission, he was met with strange looks and distrust. He tried to talk to one man who was tight-lipped; he later learned that the man thought he was an undercover cop. And when a shelter official announced plans for the mural that Friday night, there was silence.

"It was really discouraging," Tomassoni said. "I thought, 'Wow, is this even going to be able to work?' "