Considered and Unexpected Strategies - The Relevance and Contribution of Culture Making at the Time of Crisis

Abstract

Reflection, probing and open questions about a number of realized initiatives with inner-city children and youth. The following examples are based on large-scale community projects created by Artship Foundation in the last twenty years. This paper is not an attempt to idealize a practice or to come with any universal answers but to share the successes and struggles of a number of projects that tackle learning strategies for children outside of a school setting. It also deals with unspoken issues of diversity and immigrant experience while developing an approach for meaningful activities for inner-city youth and young adults on probation. The paper starts with a reflection on the Crisis of Perseverance as articulated in 1991 by Slobodan Dan Paich, co- author of this paper and responded to it with Artship Initiatives. This articulation and number of strategies were in response to a local need and a more global contemporary problem, particularly among urban youth of having few role models or witnessing success through perseverance. Artists of all types are the embodiment of achievable mastery and the tangible experience of completion. Hence the name Artship, an exciting, ever changing campus surrounding concrete job training programs. The examples from Artship Foundation projects are: Children and ArchitectureSix years ongoing, citywide project, with discrete scholarships and care for children at riskFlagpole projectFive years ongoing project with youth as helpers, coordinators and community liaisonsAmphitheater Revival Project, Arroyo Viejo ParkThree years, summer park project for children and youth in one of the most high crime areas of Oakland, CaliforniaArtship, The ShipMulti layered local and international programming with a strong focus on inner city children and youthWindows Project Over ten years period an ongoing, uninterrupted series of public visual art exhibitions using empty storefront windows in downtown Oakland, California. Famous, emerging and aspiring artists at every level of mastery participated, including children, youth and seniors.Re-imaging detention cellsA summer project involving the conversion of former detention cells into art projects by juvenile probation youth who had lost friends and relatives to street violence. The project was to help them in part to address their unmet grieving issues.The paper’s central subject Children and Youth in Crisis, opens final questions about the cultural dynamics and issues raised by the examples from Artship’s programming: experiential learning for children, vocational training for all types of learning styles and focused preparation for doing and making mastery. In closing, some practical and meta–questions are asked about nature of crisis, inevitable crisis of growing up and societal and economic crisis’s effect on children and youth.