SOCIAL ISSUES : Young Inner-City Artists Given a Boost : Youths, downtown patrons get together, thanks to a Boston teaching, development group.

Inner-city teen-agers and downtown professionals mingled before a recent art auction while a hip-hop group harmonized on “Old Man River.”

Conversations marked the freshness and urgency of the students’ work. Three teen-agers in baggy jeans and out-sized jackets sold clothing with the graffiti-style logo “salted”--a word that can mean assaulted or insulted, or both. The lights were dim and the donated food was gourmet.

The auction was a benefit for the burgeoning Boston-based youth development group Artists for Humanity. Pulling in $5,000 for student artwork and gathering about 300 people who might never have met otherwise, the event accomplished the essence of the group’s mission.

“It’s equally important for people to hear them as for the kids to have something to say,” said program co-founder Susan Rodgerson, a minimalist painter.

“They have limited opportunity to communicate with the adult population--it’s their neighborhood, their teachers. By applying their ideas to fine art, they reach the business community.”

Ron Nicynski, a sales manager in Cohasset, Mass., who described his family as classic suburbanites with little contact with the inner city, called the art “refreshing.”

“This is America, this is who’s going to run our country,” Nicynski said, adding that he wished he had brought his own children.

After joining Rodgerson to paint a pilot mural as middle school students in 1991, about 15 teen-agers went to work in her studio and eventually started a nonprofit company that designs T-shirts for Massachusetts universities and colleges, as well as the “salted” gear. They also do individual pieces--from lilting, simple figures to strident medleys of graffiti and dark-visioned portraits.

A dozen of those students are now paid to come, three times a week during the school year and full time in the summer, to the group’s downtown loft--where along with artistic technique, they learn to present their work to potential clients and funders.

Because of limited funding--the program ran this year on about $102,000, including rent and salaries for Rodgerson, co-founder Kate Schrauth and part-time teacher Tim Jones--no more students can be paid. Another 75 have dropped in periodically this year, and seven attended a new six-week program for younger students. By next summer, 235 students will have participated in Artists for Humanity, Schrauth estimated.

In the last two years, their exhibits and commissioned work for businesses such as Lotus Development Corp. and the student loan fund known as Nellie Mae have brought in about $55,000 and affected thousands more people, Schrauth said. For instance, David B. Walek, a partner with Boston’s largest law firm, Ropes & Gray, and a member of the group’s board of directors, said the self-portrait his firm bought by 17-year-old Carlos Lewis is the only piece in its vast art collection depicting a black person.

Participants and program supporters said students are gaining more than the self-esteem or mastery of airbrush technique that would come naturally with a strong art program.

“It’s taught me a number of things--entrepreneurship, business skills, public speaking,” said Artists for Humanity’s first graduate, Damon Butler, 18.

About half the 98 students who have participated so far had run into trouble with the law or at school before joining, Rodgerson said.

Butler said he was on the verge of dealing drugs when a friend told him not to waste his talent, and Artists for Humanity gave him an outlet. Eventually, the group helped him patch together enough scholarships to attend Boston’s Art Institute.