ART MEETS JUSTICE

It didn't take long before I fell in love with the class. Though it required alot of work with alot of parts, I soon began to look forward to the sessions. Especially when we began to have part of our classes at Lockerman Bundy Elementary School, where an group of the school's Experience Corps workers, along with mothers and grandmothers from the surrounding community, helped make Flowermart material. It was here that I began to develop a lasting relationship with mentor, Jay Wolf Schlossberg-Cohen, head of Rebuilding thru Art (RAP), and an internationally recognized studio artist. He had begun the program in 2003 with a mission to "ignite community engagement, empowerment, and action through art." And was it ever working. We conducted the community workshops in a building that was long suppose to be closed. Like many schools in Baltimore City and around the nation, Lockerman-Bundy was caught up in a game where education for inner-city youth were clearly not a top priority. When RAP arrived at the school, there was a library with no books. Many of the city's schools were completed with cement walls similar to the inside of a maximum prison facility, painted "prison white" as Jay called it, and Lockerman Bundy was no different. But then came my first real example of how community art, partnered with real social justice solutions can make a community do a 180 degree turn. With the help of RAP, a book drive was held- and students finally saw material on the completely empty shelves of their "library." This was followed by my first real proof of how much of an impact art can have on a human life. The organization executed a mural over every inch of hallway space on the second floor of the school. With the theme of Searching for New and Better Worlds, students completed workshops and came up with the images of student-astronauts flying through the universe, and Lockerman Bundy Bears on spaceshuttles. Color finally killed all the depressing white walls and the attitude that "this is just the way it is." By simply making the children feel like their space wasn't a correctional facility- but a place where magic truly happens, test scores went up. The color had literally brung everything back to life. Shortly after, the school's principle received a call that they would remain open.