Art and Social Services
By Ashley Cecil, www.ashleycecil.com
We are all familiar to some degree with the organizations Metro United Way contributes to, but often times that familiarity is merely on a surface level. I’m very fortunate to have been much more deeply involved with many of these organizations firsthand, and so I thought I would share one example of how those donation dollars equate to tangible outcomes.
My love of meshing the visual arts with social causes led me to the Louisville Visual Art Association (LVAA) in 2008 to manage a program called Open Doors. In this program, local artists are hired to facilitate the creation of community art projects with disadvantaged participants recruited from other nonprofits in the area. This June, LVAA hired artist, Guy Tedesco, to work with clients of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Kentuckiana (a MUW organization) and youth from the Metro Park Department’s Baxter Community Center on a large tile mosaic.
Through a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council’s Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial, LVAA was able to develop a project that combined Lincoln’s history with the arts and community outreach. The youth from this group went on a series of field trips, including to the Filson Historical Society and Farmington Historic Planation, to get ideas for their mosaic design from the historians’ stories and their collections.
Currently, the project participants are meeting weekly at the Baxter Community Center implementing what they learned about Lincoln through colorful tile. The finished artwork will be installed at the Beecher Park on 9th street/Roy Wilkins Ave in downtown.
Liberty Park
This project has been an excellent example of education through the arts, as well as the power of collaboration. The youth will be unveiling their artwork to the public sometime this late summer. None of this would have been possible were it not for the long list of organizations, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of Kentuckiana, who have come together with LVAA to execute this grand plan.
To really see the impact these opportunities have on the youth we serve, visit LVAA’s website (www.louisvillevisualart.org) to get information in the coming weeks on when to attend the public unveiling of the mosaic. I hope you will join us.
