Birthdays are a big deal at the Art Garage.  We like to make the birthday girl or boy in charge of running the show that day. We like to give presents and celebrate with lots of joy.  Birthdays are a way of celebrating the individual.  Art, being about self-expression, is all about the individual finding his or her voice.  So birthdays get the thumbs up from us.

We have two Halloween babies at the Art Garage (really Oct 28th!).  So we will be painting pumpkins and then setting them up at the new Community Houses.  It is exciting since the closing on the two houses is the 28th itself.  Wow, what a month!

Purchasing the new Community Houses means a new chapter for the Art Garage activities.  These two new spaces will create a year-round youth apprenticeship program among other exciting contributions to the neighborhood.  So instead of hosting our traditional closing Art Garage activity in the Garage, we decided to combine the two events.  The Haunted Art Garage will now become a Haunted Community House and Painting Party.

What an amazing start of our new endeavor!

The girls stopped by after school the other day and had projects for class.  The youngest needed to do something on her favorite animal, the cat.  We pulled out cardboard, sissors, glue and an old cat calendar and started working.  The older girl had to create a portfolio for her art class.  I set her up in the back of the garage by the big mirror I found by the side of the road, and gave her some paper and charcoal and told her to do a self-portrait. 

"I CAN'T DRAW!"  She said, and nothing went on the paper.

Although she had many, many items from the work she had done in the garage, she didn't select those.  She had an idea that it needed to be something else.  I am not sure what, but I wasn't able to help her and she simply didn't hand in anything.

The next day, the youngest came bouncing in to let me know her teacher liked her project, while the older sister sulked and made negative comments.  She told me she failed her art assignment.  My ego was not happy about that.  How could one of my Art Garage girls FAIL ART?  I did my best to convince her she had plenty of work to share, that we could simply go back in the garage and pull out dozens of pieces of art.  She wasn't convinced.  Finally, I sent her away with paper and markers and she imitated the teacher's sample.  She informed me her new effort got an A.

What is Art?  There is an art table in the yard with layers and layers of paint.  I was looking at it the other day and it looked to me like a piece of artwork.  I painted the words, "What is Art?"  to provoke some thought in the Art Garage kids as they sat and worked.  I am not sure they pondered the message as they pulled the paint off, but I did watch them peeling off the layers, and leaving the word "Art?"

Whenever I talk about art, I hear adults say, "I am not creative."  Ultimately they mean, they do not have a certain skill set that basically represents fine art mastery.  But creativity, and for that matter, art is not about a skill set as much as it is about seeing things from a different perspective.  It is about willing to express oneself in a way other than the convention.  Or even if one uses the convention, it is about turning the convention on its head.

Art ultimately provides a different way of knowing the world.  It is experiential. It is embodied. It is emotional.  It is the outward expression of something living in the soul, or the culture, or the emotional life of the artist, or the community.

Well, how do we encourage that, instead of simply having our art student copy the teacher's example?

I have been watching this interesting documentary available on youtube called Childhood 2.0.  It talks about our giant social experiment in screentime and social media.  This new screen based world is only growing as we have taken even our traditional education, because of the Corona Virus into the virtual screen world.

The findings from this documentary are somewhat disturbing.  The increase in teen suicide alone is alarming.  There are findings of less empathy, more anxiety, and more depression.  Overall we are losing touch with the things that really matter, and losing touch with our selves in the process.

Peter Gray has done extensive research on the role of play in the healthy developmental process, particularly in the development of healthy emotional systems in the brain.  How do we bring back authentic experiences outside the virtual world?  He makes a few suggestions at the end of his amazing Ted talk. He calls on us adults to make possible spaces for children to engage in creative play.  This is one of the things I hope the Art Garage provides.  But I am not the only one in my community doing good things to get children outside, communicating and away from the screens.

The Art Garage is welcoming its community counterpart Kids Awaken into the fold as we work to bring deeper meaning and greater values into the experiences and lives of the kids in our community.  Shantel Wells started working with the kids in her neighborhood several years ago when she lived in Florida with her 6 children and noticed that their friends needed mentoring and guidance to understand the world around them.

Well, I am so lucky that her kids have also been engaged in the Art Garage and so I have had the chance to connect and get to know these amazing girls.  I am so grateful to have met their amazing mother who has also agreed to be a founding board member at the Community House Network!

What an amazing neighborhood!

There are certain kids I refer to as High Creatives.  These children are usually unlikely to succeed in the traditional school system.  They may or may not have extremely high IQs as we measure them with traditional IQ tests.  Just as an aside, creativity is only correlated with IQ up to 115.  Then it quickly stops being related to our traditional measures of intelligence.  Also, just as important, empathy and emotional intelligence hardly correlate at all with our standard IQ tests.  These truths should not be taken lightly.

What happens to our kiddos who don't "measure-up"?  They tend to develop self-limiting beliefs that hold them back from fulfilling their souls desires.  More often than not, these children grow up believing they are dumb, and many of them end up believing they are bad.

I cannot tell you how many times I have worked with children who believed they were dumb and incompetent because they did not learn in the traditional way.  These children often were lost in class, and would find other ways to engage their own creative drives.  At time those activities lead to disruption or messy spills or misuse of materials that lead to punishment.

Because teachers didn't see these high creatives for the incredible gifts they held, they wound up feeling inferior.  What a terrible legacy our public education has left for our highly creative children.

It is really happening! 

I am feeling the reality of this idea taking form.  What an expansive experience.  Of course it is still an idea, but the houses make it real.  These two beautiful houses, places of so much potential are bringing the intangible realm of idea into physical reality.  I am a bit speechless.

So many fun and wonderful things are happening.  I discovered that the founding members of the Art Garage, my two lively energetic boys and their sister, live right across the street from the new houses.  They had moved away, closer to the downtown, and then recently moved back in the area.  As they are now getting older, participating in the entrepreneurial side of this project should fit just perfectly with their development. 

My neighbor across the street works mentoring young boys, and his cousin works to apprentice youth on rehabbing houses in Peoria.  My neighbor across the alley works with youth in a program she developed herself.  My other neighbor fixes cars, always including his own kids and grandkids, and is eager to make use of the garage to do this work.  It is like the perfect storm of willingness.

It never ceases to amaze me the way life unfolds.  When I let go of fear and trying to control the world, those things that are most needed for what I am meant to do appear just in time. Today I especially feel and see the support all around me.  There is so much goodwill for this project.  I know I just need to open the doors for those who are here to participate and help to arrive.