This Shouldn't Be So Hard

Kids in trouble used to go to Arts Connect for help. Now it may be gone.

A self-portrait painted in an Arts Connect class. Name withheld to protect the student's privacy.

Tacoma’s Arts Connect, one of the nation’s only programs for juvenile offenders based in an art museum (the Museum of Glass), faces an imminent demise due to (surprise!) lack of funding. While its end may not cause a huge spike in unemployment numbers, this is a program that should not be allowed to go quietly.

Here’s how it works (or worked — AC needs roughly one hundred thousand dollars to continue at MOG): Teenage girls on probation in Pierce County attend eleven weeks of free classes at MOG, where they complete creative projects. They might design a line of glass beads, make an animated film or blow glass in the museum’s famed Hot Shop. Their work culminates in a public presentation at Third Thursday Artwalk.

Last Spring, I taught for Arts Connect. After students finished painting self-portraits (shown here), I helped them create complementary written self-portraits. Considering the issues these girls were facing (living in group homes, drugs and drinking, new foster parents, failing school), I might as well have asked some of them to scale a ten-foot wall with no rope.

At dinner break (AC also funds nutritious meals), a girl I’ll call Georgia could gossip and joke with the others comfortably, but the minute I put a pencil in her hand to write a poem on “How to Be Me,” all she could say was: I don’t do anything. I go to work, I go home, I see weirdos on the bus. Nobody wants to read about me. “They do,” I assured her, “if you can convince them that no one sees the weirdos on the bus quite the way you do.”

At the end of the session, I watched all but one girl read their work before an audience of friends, AC graduates, Artwalkers, court staff, probation officers and a few family members. During the Q & A, a Pierce County court judge stood up, almost tearful, and lauded the girls’ accomplishments. As we hugged goodbye, many of the girls told me they were coming back to the program, which opens its doors to graduates indefinitely, whether they are still on probation or not.

Until now. At press time, the AC girls’ program was finishing its last session at MOG.

Besides the recession, AC suffers from cultural skepticism of these girls’ value as artistic investments. They’re not “good girls,” and they may not become art stars. At a Museum of Glass reception, I struck up a conversation with a man who was waiting for Dale Chihuly to autograph a coffee-table book. I explained that in AC, “Every week girls show up, make art, eat dinner and, so long as they meet requirements, come back as often as they want.”

He deadpanned: “Seems like fun. Kids probably do bad stuff just to get in, huh?”

I moved on, but his disregard for the girls stuck with me.

Since it began its programming in 2004, AC has thrived. Last year, it brought forty all-day workshops into Remann Hall, Tacoma’s juvenile detention center, and graduated forty-two girls from post-release classes at MOG. AC and the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration also started a separate AC for young men on parole.

Though the effectiveness of AC is obvious to anyone who witnesses it in action, it’s unique in America due to the fact that there aren’t yet studies proving that the program reduces recidivism. Like the man in line to meet Chihuly, donors might think AC risks becoming a reward for bad behavior, instead of a treatment for it.

There is a risk, particularly for the students involved. It’s the risk of opening up an imagination that has become defined by incarceration, lockdown, abandoned hope. Every time these girls made something in AC, they made themselves vulnerable, in a way that home life or detention life didn’t allow.

Minutes before we were to begin our showcase, one girl found out her family would not be attending the AC presentation she had been looking forward to for ten weeks because her brother had basketball practice. Normally the group’s funniest, most effusive girl, she sat staring at her lap until the reading began.

Probation officer Joy Schaad calls the program an “attitude breaker.” “[AC is] a supportive environment, which makes it easier to try new things.” One evening Schaad and another probation officer visited the class. They joined the girls in composing a short poem about themselves. I watched as the officers, who at other times have to act as hard figures of authority, were suddenly joking and scribbling and erasing and scribbling more.

This is what Arts Connect teaches. I don’t get it, but I’ll try. I haven’t before, but maybe I can now.

“If this were a science group, I wonder, would we have the same relationships?” asks AC program manager Diana Falchuk. “I think no. There’s something about making art together and getting to be this ‘other you . . . ’”

The “other you” is the unquantifiable element of AC, impossible to chart in grant proposals. How to quantify creativity’s gains? In the same way, I guess, you graph the trends of calm a child experiences while coloring. That is, you don’t. The connections at AC are real, and we should not cut them off on account of some abstract prediction that says we can’t afford them.

I wonder, if each of MOG’s 178,000 annual visitors donated sixty cents on top of their admission, could AC be saved? Or if local businesses sponsored AC girls (sixty students per year at about sixteen hundred dollars annually per head), could they operate like Little League teams (even silk-screen jerseys to represent their benefactors)?

Wherever the solution lies, I think we can afford Arts Connect. We just have to decide whether we want it or not.

For more information about Arts Connect and its history, revisit our November/December 2007 article “A-Pod 2 Arts Connect,” available at cityartsmagazine.com. To contact Arts Connect staff with questions or to donate, please email diana@dianafalchuk.com.