nothin Soup Kitchen Line Transformed Into Gallery | New Haven Independent

Soup Kitchen Line Transformed Into Gallery

Allan Appel Photo

Zbigniew Wilczewski was served a portratit along with lunch.

As the bitter cold sets in, the homeless need …

Shelter? Check.

Hot food? Check.

How about art?

That was on the menu, too, at Wednesday’s lunch for the homeless at St. Thomas More Center on Park Street.

The dozens who ended up drawing and being drawn indeed added art to the checklist.

Magdalania Torrez had a vision of praying hands in a clock and asked Messer to draw it for her. She’s going to give it to her daughter.

The soup kitchen has been functioning for 30 years. The drawing sessions, conducted by Yale School of Art students with and for the hundreds who line up for lunch, began three weeks ago. They are already a hit.

People are beginning to line up as early as 9 a.m. for the 11 a.m. lunch., said soup kitchen volunteer Kathleen Cooney.

The drawing sessions keep people occupied and calm as they wait. Sometimes an art student will draw a diner. Sometimes two diners, while they are waiting, will draw each other, and meet each other in the process.

I’m learning who he is by drawing him,” said Robert Rios as he took a light purple pencil to paper and tried for the likeness of Aaron Fowler, a second-year art student. Fowler was also drawing him. (They’re pictured above.)

Stroke for stroke, the student and the guy down on his luck engaged in a visual conversation.

This is my first time doing this,” said Rios. He graduated from Wilby High School in Waterbury in 1984. He hadn’t made a drawing since. Until Wednesday. He said he enjoyed getting back to the art.

It takes you a little away from your problems,” he said.

After he worked on the drawing of Fowler for another ten minutes, he set down his pencil and said, Mine didn’t come out very well.”

A modest exhibit of some of the lunch guests’ work is already up.

You’re too modest,” chimed in Ana Maria Gomez Lopez, another of the students involved in the project.

You did the goatee justice. You’ve got skills,” Fowler said to Rios.

Ten minutes ago I was cold. Art warms you up,” he added, and then returned to the line for the lunch.

As more people dropped by the art table set up by the line, they asked to be drawn, or to draw. The courtyard at St. Thomas was transformed from a line-up of down-and-out people into a friendly plaza.

It wasn’t clear who was getting more out of the exchanges, the students or the soup kitchen’s clients.

It’s both a pretext for as well as a form of meeting, said Sam Messer.

Messer is the associate dean of the Yale School of Art, headquartered nearby on Chapel Street. Last year, one of St. Thomas’s chaplains Jamie Cappetta asked him to have his students do a show of their work to mark the anniversary of the soup kitchen.

This year Messer decided that the guests themselves should do the art.

As the homeless — always referred to, with dignity, as the guests” — line up at St. Thomas More’s courtyard, Messer and his graduate art students set up tables, along with drawing pencils, pads, and pastel crayons.

Last week first-year art student Danielle Friedman drew a portrait of Zbigniew Wilczewski (pictured at top of the story). She wasn’t at the drawing table this week; Wilczewski carried the portrait in his vest pocket near his heart as he waited on line for lunch.

A native of northern Poland, he has been homeless in New Haven for two years. He often sleeps outside in a sleeping bag.

Maria Matos wasn’t smiling when Messer began drawing her portrait. She wanted to send it to her son in Puerto Rico, so she was smiling by the time he finished.

She knows how much I suffer inside. It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing my own ghost,” he said.

Messer said the plan is for his students to man the table through the school year, collect the art and make a show of the clients’ work in honor of the soup kitchen’s 30th birthday.

Wilczewski’s picture will probably not be among them, unless the organizers borrow it, he said. I’m going to keep it and put it in a frame when I get the chance.”

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