A Summer Job Like No Other
Art and Job Skills Make ArtWorks One-of-a-Kind

If Chastity Wesley wasn’t practicing her jazz dance drills on Shaker Square this sunny July morning, “I’d probably be working at a restaurant or just kickin’ it with my friends,” said the Shaker Heights 11th-grader. But instead of responding to calls of “order up!,” Wesley’s heeding the call of her dance instructor that break’s over and it’s time to get back to practicing their “Jazz Through the Decades” number. She returns to her group under a cluster of white tents, which at the moment also houses a group of young painters and collage artists, a steel drum band and budding thespians practicing monologues.

This isn’t summer camp. It’s Wesley’s job, a unique summer internship program called ArtWorks that brings Cleveland-area high school students together for six weeks to work with master artists in dance, visual arts, music, theatre and photography. They’re earning $7 an hour to learn from some of the best artists in the region, but more importantly they’re learning job skills like showing up on time, working as a team, professional behavior and how to price and sell their work...

“You can tell the ones who come in just looking for a job, and think this will be fun,” says Marsha Dobrzynski, executive director of Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio, which sponsors ArtWorks. “But even the ones who are really passionate about it find that it’s really hard work.”

A Dream Born in Chicago
ArtWorks is Dobrzynski’s baby, an idea that began to germinate after a summertime trip to Chicago a few years back. There she saw students practicing every genre of visual and performing arts under white tents along Michigan Avenue. It was the ground-breaking job-training program Gallery 37, which started in the early 1990s as a way for Chicago teens to learn artistic and job-related skills from experienced artists. It has since grown to a year-round after-school program that teaches creative writing, sports, culinary arts, technology-related skills and much more.

Dobrzynski returned to Cleveland dreaming of bringing a similar program here. In a serendipitous moment, Young Audiences benefactor Deborah Ratner mentioned seeing Gallery 37 herself and expressed interest in supporting such a program in Cleveland. With the financial support of the Ratner family and Forest City Enterprises, along with other local sponsors, Young Audiences launched ArtWorks in summer 2005 with a two-week pilot. It has since grown to include 63 students in a six-week program encompassing painting, collage, murals, photography, theatre, dance and music. Prominent members of the business and arts community – everyone from Ivan Schwarz of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission to Baiju Shah of Bio Enterprise? – come in twice weekly to offer advice and inspiration to the teens. The results of the ArtWorks students’ efforts are displayed to the community in three public performances – the last of which will take place Thursday, August 2, at 6:00 p.m. on Shaker Square – which they are responsible for staging, promoting and executing.

Learning From the Masters
Not far from where Chastity Wesley practices her jazz number on a temporary stage, a group of young painters work on their canvases under a shady tree on Shaker Square. Over the steady beat of hip-hop music, instructor Augusto Bordelois encourages these ArtWorks students to keep adding layers to create greater depth in their paintings. When words fail him, he takes a student’s brush and shows her what he means.

Bordelois faced tough competition for the opportunity to be an ArtWorks instructor. He’s one of only nine area artists who made the cut, from nearly 30 who applied. He had to submit a detailed proposal not only of how he would teach color, technique and materials, but also about the business of being an artist – how to price and promote artwork, develop self-discipline and other tangible job skills that students could use in any chosen profession.

Here at ArtWorks, the instructors go by the title “master artists” and the title well applies to Bordelois. This Cuban-born artist’s work has been exhibited all over the world, and he serves locally as assistant director of 1point618 Gallery in Cleveland and as an instructor at the Little Red Schoolhouse in Berea. He says he takes time away from a busy and successful art career to teach at ArtWorks because he gets to see a true transformation in his students.

“It’s really amazing – when they come to me they know zero,” says Bordelois. “But I get to see them evolve. Painting 30 hours a week for six weeks, they go from knowing nothing to getting good enough that they could sell their work.” One of Bordelois’ students sold a painting on the spot – before it was even completed – for $50 to a curious passerby. “They say, ‘wow, someone’s going to give me $50 for this?’ They start to see that if they do this every day, art is something that they could earn a living at. It sure beats McDonald’s.”

Bordelois hopes he’ll see the day when ArtWorks – like Gallery 37 – becomes a year-round internship program. “Once I train them, I want to be able to use them for something,” he says. “I think, if this is how far they’ve come in just six weeks, what will they be able to do next year?”

Painting the Future
As interest and name recognition – not to mention funding – of ArtWorks grows, Dobrzynski also hopes to make it a year-round program. Each year, the number of interested students grows – more than 120 applied this year for 63 spots – as former participants spread the word. While many returned to the program this summer and others have kept in touch, Dobrzynski says Young Audiences hopes to do more in the future to track the progress of their ArtWorks students. Are they going to college? Are they continuing to paint, dance, act and perform music? Are they entering arts-related fields? The answers aren’t clear, says Dobrzynski.

“We put equal weight on the training in the arts and the job skills training,” she says. “They’re better prepared to continue in both areas. They’ve learned skills through art that are very transferable to other careers. You get to see them develop their ability to work as a team, all working toward the same deadlines – the public performances.”

For Chastity Wesley’s part, she’s hoping to go to Bowling Green State University after graduation to become a dance choreographer … or an ER doctor. She’s not sure which. She says ArtWorks is helping her determine whether she could make a career out of dance, while improving her skills at the same time. “I’ll still always dance,” she says. “Dancing is a way for me to let out my emotions, and show my personality.” Plus it’s a whole lot more fun than just kickin’ it at home.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Jennifer Keirn jenniferkATwowway.com
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