Unleashing Creativity : Arts Center Has a No-Fail Approach for Culturally Deprived Children

Children who visit downtown’s Inner City Arts Center studio squeal in delight and tear toward a great igloo-like structure covered in tan butcher paper and decorated in the mysterious hieroglyphics of grade schoolers.

Yards of paper catch the light of a nearby window, transmitting a rich acorn glow that beckons the children inside. They do so with near-abandon, scooting low through a narrow entryway to gather within and whisper in a special place they have created.

None of the children know it, but the “art cave” made by students from a nearby elementary school is really a metaphor for the one-of-a-kind arts center, opened last fall by an artist and a real estate financier as a haven for the impoverished and culturally undernourished children of the city’s urban core.

“I look at all the graffiti in the city and I think sometimes these young people are crying out to express themselves,” said artist Bob Bates, director and co-founder of Inner City Arts. “If we can show children who come to us that there’s a channel for this, I believe we can get them to believe in themselves and love who they are.”

Nearly 600 children from downtown’s 9th Street Elementary School and Para Los Ninos Latchkey program come to the huge art studio on Olympic Boulevard near Central Avenue each week, either to attend one-hour classes or to spend the after-school hours as part of the latchkey program.

They come from some of the city’s most troubled spots, from crowded brick apartments near MacArthur Park and dank single room hotels on Skid Row. For most, life has not offered the richness that shapes a more affluent child: no wide green lawn and plenty of toys to play with, no summer camp, no crafts with mom or dad.

There is a deep conviction among Bates, a former art teacher at the University of Miami, and other teachers at Inner City Arts that they must reawaken the muffled creative urges that fuel a child’s learning and self-esteem.

In this lofty, warm room stocked with paints, ceramics, a kiln, a piano, a video camera, and, of course, the art cave, that creative force is being let loose.

“We love art class and we wish we could come every day but we get to come two days,” said Anna Maria Diaz, 11. “There’s nothing like this in regular school and I don’t think anywhere else, even. Here we’ve done animals and houses and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We love ceramics and we love painting!”

Almost entirely funded from private sources, the center offers free one-hour classes to children from 9th Street Elementary School who walk with their teachers from the school, at Stanford and Towne avenues near Skid Row, to the studio to attend class as part of their regular school day.

Lacking badly needed buses, Inner City Arts runs an outreach class in which program teachers visit schools whose children cannot get to the studio. Each week, they visit 270 children at Utah, San Pedro and 28th Street elementary schools.

Real estate financier Irwin Jaeger put up $137,000 to create the Inner City Arts Center, leasing the large studio in a neighborhood of low-slung industrial buildings. Jaeger, a Beverly Hills resident, oversees a private foundation that is donating and raising funds to expand the studio to serve other schools. Jaeger hopes the studio can one day serve 5,500 inner-city children.

Unlike public school, the Inner City Arts program follows few rules. Classes are taught not by trained teachers, but by professional artists such as Bob Nydam, Summer Lowe and Gail Bates. There are no grades, no tests, no work sheets--and no failures.

“Because we are working with the creative minds and hearts of the children, when we give materials to them they make and create things that we adults cannot even conceive,” said Bob Bates, a lanky and soft-spoken man who always hovers near the children, and whom they call simply “Bob.”

Debra Sanders, a single mother who lives with her brother at the Premier Towers apartment on a tattered stretch of Spring Street downtown, said it is a constant struggle to provide “a real childhood” for her daughter, Angel, a 7-year-old student at 9th Street school.

The close-knit mother and daughter have been homeless once before, and live only in hotels.

“Angel can go out of the apartment and see a bum on the street and that can bring a lot onto any child,” Sanders said. “That’s where the art center comes in. You can tell your kid they’re the greatest all day long, but When somebody else says it and gives them a chance to prove it, that makes all the difference.”

One recent day, 5th- and 6th-graders from 9th Street were daubing bright colors onto their handmade ceramics, readying them for the last firing in the kiln.

Excited jostling flared up as a line formed to use a big jar of green paint. It was the key ingredient for completing a handcrafted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle replica, and there were nearly a dozen versions of the popular creature clutched in small hands.

But as is always the way at Inner City Arts, no child felt constrained to follow the pack. Ivan Munoz, 10, painstakingly applied blue paint to tiny clay clothing and put a removable hat on a figurine of a Dodger baseball player created by a friend. It was, Ivan said, a team project.

“I’m in latchkey and after school we get to come here again, and it’s the best,” Ivan said. “Then, after that, my dad comes and picks me up, but you know what? I’m not always ready to go!”

The idea for the studio grew from a casual conversation Bob Bates and Jaeger had a few years ago about helping children.

“These kids are sponges who absorb everything, and we know we are giving them a chance to absorb the right things,” said Jaeger, a frequent and popular visitor to the studio. “This is all about giving kids the equal opportunity so that they can stay equal as adults.”

That philosophy has earned the art center the respect of parents and of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Betty Peifer, principal of the 9th Street school, said the entire school is enrolled in the federal free lunch program because so many students come from low-income families.

“These children are not just needy in monetary terms,” Peifer said, “and if people go and see what is happening they will know how wonderful this program is.”

Peifer, who bemoans the small amount of school district money used to run arts and music programs, said one major benefit of Inner City Arts “is just the space, the bigness, the airiness, the size of a place where a child can be free who lives in pretty cramped quarters.”

She said the district pays about 1% of the cost of the Inner City Arts program.

But the center does get help.

Donations arrive at the studio weekly, ranging from loads of tempera for painting to shipments of foam and other basic building blocks for creating art. Rega Petlin, director of development at the studio, said volunteers have begun to appear at the front door, just wanting to give their time.

“One woman comes faithfully every Tuesday and helps run the office,” Petlin said. “She said she just wants to be near the kids.”

Yet for all the good, there is the constant reminder that just outside the front door, a harsh world awaits these children. A homeless woman lives beside the center, and Bates has hired her at $5 an hour to clean up the studio.

Bates sees each new twist and turn as a chance to show children how to maintain their self-worth in an increasingly uncertain urban milieu.

“I see these children rising above incredible problems and incredible adversity,” he said. “If we can give them the tools to do that, we will have a better culture for it.”