Tucker T. may grow up to become a 21st century Jackson Pollock — if he makes it through the juvenile justice system.
In the meantime, Tucker showed up Thursday night at the Art Council’s Small Space Gallery at 70 Audubon St. for the opening of Who I am on the inside, a pioneering exhibition of the art work of kids in Connecticut’s juvenile justice system.
The pictures were produced in art therapy classes at four juvenile detention centers across the state. Through the show, we get to know Tucker and a dozen more of the 12,000 kids caught up in the system. The double point of the exhibition, which runs through March 13, is to showcase not only the art itself but how art therapy helps troubled teens.
Like many of the artists in the show, Tucker, who’s 16, lives at the Connecticut Juvenile Training School in Middletown. He showed a series of six oil-on-canvas paintings titled “Pain From the Past.” Asked what he’s trying to get at, the quiet young man from Clinton said, “I just stared at the colors for a while and then I started flinging the paint.”
“I think I’m trying to get rid of my past,” he said. “Splatting away. Putting my emotions on the canvas.”
He said red was anger and blue something cooler, a cooling down like water. He didn’t want to speculate on the white drippings that fall like wax droplets across the larger swaths.
Marta Cunha (pictured with Tucker), along with Julie Nearing, does most of the art classes with the kids at CJTS. She said Tucker’s work has now moved on from these abstracts to representational work. “He’s drawing faces now, and some full figures. One in a tuxedo is a drowning man, and then that was followed by a skeleton.”
This kind of thing, of course, has symbolic meanings, she said. That offers often useful information in the counseling of the kids, especially if they are reluctant to use words in their therapies. Cunha said her task is not to analyze but just to get the kids to put brush to paper or canvas. She’s been doing this work for nine years.
The classes go for three to four hours, in a relaxed atmosphere, where kids can move in and out at will.
The show’s organizers, the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, hope it helps alter the perception that the kids in the system are stereotyped menaces, “delinquents.”
“We want to use the art the kids produce in the art therapy classes,” said Lara Herscovitch a senior policy analyst at the alliance, “to show that these kids are not to be dreaded and feared; that they have hopes, dreams, and, yes, troubles too; that they in short are like your kids or mine.”
Herscovitch is standing next to “Overwhelmed,” a busy but not chaotic oil painting by Nate (the young artists identify themselves, for privacy reasons, only by first names), age 16.
Almost all the works have titles such as “I Don’t Fit In” or “Chaotic Compartmentalization.” They that reveal art is being deployed to help the kids to express themselves through color and shape and the other mysterious but powerful communication by-passes art offers. Many of the kids are deeply withdrawn or angry or both, and words have not always been available to them.
Two other kids present Thursday evening were Manny and Stephen, pictured left to right, both 15, from New London and Meriden respectively. Although they didn’t have their own work on exhibition, they knew Shawn G., whose “Tears From My Past” hung behind them.
“I watched him work on this,” said Stephen. “It took him two or three days.” The tears, some golden, some red, some blue all fall across a green background, almost elegantly; these are tears that seem to a reporter’s eye to be closer to Christmas ornaments, as if the artist might still be holding on to them.
“When I was watching Shawn do this I wasn’t able to do anything on the canvas myself,” said Stephen. “Then the basketball coach came by. I play on the CJTS team as a point guard. He said, ‘Just let yourself be creative with the paint like you create good situations on the b‑ball court.’ So I did.”
Stephen’s work will likely be in the next exhibition, which organizers hope will become an annual event.
The young artists attend art therapy classes during their residency at CJTS or the three other residential facilities in the system: FSW in Bridgeport, GRACE in Hartford, which is a school for girls only, and the Touchstone program in Litchfield.
Herscovitch said the point of the alliance, an advocacy group founded six years ago, is to keep kids out of the system. If the kids, they want to make sure that the juvenile system, which is rehabilitative (as opposed to the adult system, which is punitive), works for them. The art therapy is part of the rehabilitation. The alliance has been instrumental in setting up alternatives to detention and incarceration, such as juvenile review boards. A point of pride, she added, is their work in helping to craft new legislation, to become law in 2010, to treat 16 and 17 year olds as juveniles; Connecticut is currently one of three states in the nation, she said, that currently treats 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. “Truancy or stealing a candy bar should not, “ she said, “lead kids to jail.”
Jaqueline Kabaki, another alliance staffer, announced that nearly a dozen of the art works, including “My Pathway” by Trevor, had been sold. Proceeds from the sales (most of the works were priced at $40) go entirely to the young artists.
What a great program! I wish all prisons, regardless of the age of the residents, would provide opportunities for those who want to put their lives together. I know someone at Osbourne Prison near Suffield, CT. They provide NOTHING for the betterment of the men there. There are no educational nor therapy opportunities. The person I know is trying very hard to find correspondence courses in order to work on his degree. In this age of computers, there are very few "correspondence" programs available. Of course, the prison doesn't provide access to computers, where one can enroll online for College & Master's programs. On the whole our Prison System cares NOTHING about rehabilitation. Then they bemoaned the recitivism rate & use it as proof that people in prison cannot be rehabilitated. How about "trying" rehabilitation programs?! Of course, such progams won't be helpful to everyone but will most definitely be helpful to some . . . perhaps many.