In Therapy Program, Creative Expression Is a Means of Release
By Julie Rasicot
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, December 20, 2007
With a couple of tugs, Northwood High School Principal Henry Johnson and officials from the Montgomery County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation yanked down a red sheet hanging in the Silver Spring school's main office, revealing four faces painted on large panels in green, blue, brown and red hues.
A crowd of 50 or so applauded enthusiastically at last week's unveiling of the painting, which was created by juveniles at the county jail in Boyds through a program run by Class Acts Arts of Silver Spring, a nonprofit arts outreach organization.
Titled "Panels of Hope," the mural expresses the stages of transition for inmates as they participated in specialized therapy. The program is designed to help offenders younger than 21 accept what they have done wrong and then give back to their community, corrections officials said.
The first panel, which shows one hand covering most of a face, expresses a sense of honesty emerging. In each successive panel, faces and hands show more openness, culminating in a panel in which a face is fully visible and two hands are palms up, in a gesture of giving.
Arthur Wallenstein, director of the corrections department, told the crowd that the painting was a symbol of the positive effect that creating art can have on inmates.
"In most correctional institutions, it would have been considered an intrusion," he said of Class Acts' Project Youth ArtReach, which provides juveniles in detention, corrections and probation settings with programs taught by master artists. "In our institution, we consider it a human growth opportunity."
"Programs like this diminish violence. They give people something meaningful to do," he said. "They're not fluff at all."
Project director Claire Schwadron noted that, in addition to providing a creative outlet, the program introduces young people to other cultures and helps break down differences by teaching them collaboration.
Participating "gives them a chance to understand what they have in common with each other," she said.
The mural ended up at Northwood because the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, which helped fund the $10,000 project, wanted the artwork in a public school, officials said.
Northwood was chosen because it has a diverse student population and its main office, with high white walls, had the best display space, Schwadron said.
The decision delighted Johnson, who said before the unveiling that "we wanted it badly." "I think the panels represent all young people in all our schools today," he said. "I think every child that looks at it will see some part of themselves in it."
Although none of the inmates who worked on the mural attended the unveiling, Beverly Kelly of Silver Spring came to see the work of her son, Chico. The recently released 21-year-old, who was the model for the first panel, is an aspiring musician living in New York City, she said.
The mural, more than 6 feet tall and 16 feet wide, was created over about eight months by about a dozen inmates ages 16 to 21. They worked once a week under the direction of Joey Tomassoni, a Washington artist who specializes in social realism.
Tomassoni said the inmates, who had never painted, came up with the concept after many discussions, including one in which they listened to quotes of Martin Luther King Jr. for inspiration.
"We wrestled, we really fought for this concept," he said after the unveiling.
Tomassoni said he took more than 300 photos of the offenders to determine which faces would be used as models.
The group of inmates shrank to a handful as some dropped out, were released or moved to other jails. The artists collaborated on all decisions regarding the mural, including the use of colors.
Even the act of painting affected the inmates positively, Tomassoni said. He related the story of one inmate who came to a project session angry but told Tomassoni, "Now that I've been able to paint for the last hour, I feel good."
Correctional specialist Pamela Stafford said that as she listened to the inmates working in the early stages of the project, she had wondered how Tomassoni would produce a mural out of the concept they had chosen. She said she was amazed when she saw the finished product.
"The first day they put all the panels together, I was like, 'Oh my gosh,' " she said, adding that the project has drawn the interest of other inmates who saw the mural before it was taken to Northwood. "Now we have a lot of other guys who want to do something."
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