Youths at L.A. Shelter : Learn the Art of Coping : Guidance: The wards ages 10-17 help put troubled lives in perspective through creative counseling.

The 17-year-old lifts short strips of wet newspaper that cling to the bowl, carefully smoothing each strip on the damp beige clay mold of a face.

The face on the mask is that of a young man with a big mustache, a crucifix earring in his left ear and two perfect teardrops on his left cheek.

Gustavo shapes the ears with his fingers as he talks about the Reseda gang he belongs to.

“This is my homeboy, Blinky,” he says, glancing down at the papier-mache face. “I was there when they shot him four times.”

They is a Canoga Park gang, and Blinky was 14 when he died.

Gustavo stops talking and tenderly looks down at his mask, as if he were paying his last respects.

Gustavo and the other mask-makers in this class are mostly runaways, victims of abuse or drug users sheltered at Angels Flight, a temporary home for children ages 10 to 17. The Los Angeles facility, which can accommodate 16 children, is run by Catholic Charities and offers services including family and drug counseling and an accredited education program. In addition, the youths participate in an art class twice a week where they work out their pain and anger by making masks.

Some of those masks were exhibited at the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s annual International Festival of Masks recently.

“Gustavo is dealing with grief, and then he can ask himself, ‘Can I change?’ without my lecturing him,” says Judy Levanthal, an art therapy consultant for Angels Flight.

Levanthal began teaching there in November, 1991, after meeting one of the shelter’s caseworkers at last year’s festival. The artist has been teaching art therapy via mask-making to adults for 10 years.

The youth in her classes “can put their pain and sadness into the artwork,” she says. They are dealing with complex hurts and realities in their lives. If a parent is abusing them, no one in their family is going to talk about it.”

In addition to enabling the children to deal with their hurts, Levanthal says art therapy allows the youth to unleash overlooked potential.

“The focus is creativity,” she says. “For Velma to say ‘I have beauty inside me’ and then she puts it in her art, she starts to put that feeling in her life.”

“I was immediately caught by the energy and power that comes through on the masks,” says Teri Knoll, director of the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

“She (Levanthal) approached me with the idea of having the kids’ work displayed,” she says. Knoll became excited when she saw the youths’ work on display on the walls of the Angels Flight shelter. “The masks I saw are incredibly beautiful,” says Knoll.

When the students make masks, they are asked to write a description of the feelings they have tried to convey.

Junior, a 14-year-old who lived in the shelter last year, named his mask “Disturbed.” It depicts two faces, one a bright, happy face awash with white, a red smile and a royal blue hat, the other a morose face in dark colors.

He wrote “You can see the depressed features and you can feel that his face expresses a sign of confusion. At times, I’ve felt very disturbed; and throughout I can express myself instead of keeping it to myself.”

“The reason we chose the mask as a symbol to bring together the ethnic communities in Los Angeles is because masks are prevalent in most cultures in the world,” says Knoll. Masks traditionally are used in ceremonies marking life transitions, rites of passage, the changing of the seasons and to balance the forces of good and evil, she explains.

Levanthal sees mask-making as serving similar functions for the children.

“When they come in, they are confused,” she explains. “A lot of the things that have happened to them don’t make sense to them.

“Making masks is a constructive way to deal with the mix of feelings that they have. The masks mirror what matters deeply to these kids, and it’s a fun way for them to deal with their pain.”

At 16, Irene says she’s lucky to be alive. Her big brown eyes are carefully lined with black eyeliner. The hardness of her life has crept up on her soft, pretty face. “I ran away and my dad kicked me out,” she says, rubbing at the slimy ceramic glue on her hands.

She lived on the streets for four months. “I was about to lose hope. I was killing myself with the drugs and not eating.”

And if the drugs didn’t kill her, she adds, being in a gang might have done it.

“I would have been killed if it wasn’t for Angels Flight. I stopped doing drugs, smoking, and I don’t want to gang-bang anymore.”

She describes her mask, a furious face with horns and sharp teeth as “a mean face of anger and that anger makes you go crazy and your eyes bulge out.

“The mask helps me,” she says. “It’s taking all my pain and anger. It’s making me change.”