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Baltimore, Maryland
2007
With a master's degree in religion and the arts from Yale University, Deborah Patterson, 52, is a painter whose oils and watercolors show in galleries in Baltimore, Nantucket, and even as far away as Italy and Greece. Some of her paintings show idyllic settings in Provence and Tuscany. But she also finds great beauty in the Pimlico community, ravaged by high poverty, unemployment, drug trafficking and crime and where she has taught art in after-school programs for more than a decade.
Now, Patterson has spent much of her fellowship creating an art program, developing a curriculum and teaching art classes to about 150 children, ages 5 to 14, at the newly constructed Pimlico Road Arts and Community Center. The program, called ARTEnriches, consists of an art history component followed by an art lesson in drawing and painting. She also is collaborating closely with an instructor from Baltimore Clayworks, a nonprofit ceramic art center sharing space in the building.
First, her students learned about the origins of Western art through ancient Greece. Now, they are focusing on Eastern art with an emphasis on a personal inner journey, and will create their own individual mandalas or "sacred squares," to be incorporated into a large ceramic mural that will be installed in the center's entry area. The mural's unveiling is expected in December.
Patterson and the Clayworks instructor also will offer free workshops to adults in the community to bring them into the community center and to beautify the neighborhood with their art. Patterson hopes to unify the neighborhood visually through what she calls an ART BLOCK. To accomplish this, she is working closely with the two churches that originally built the center and is assisted by a small group of creative, motivated design students from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Other outside collaborators have come forth offering help, Patterson said. Towson University is offering a film program, and another volunteer is bringing in a theater component.
"With the film and the theater part, I plan to have the kids interview the elders in the neighborhood," she said. "This will help bring more intergenerational work to the program that ideally would lead into mentoring relationships."
For Patterson, her art program is about more than simply learning to draw. It reflects her more philosophical, even spiritual, approach to art.
Art, she said, is therapeutic, calming and centering. Already, she's noticed improvements in her students' behavior. "Art is about looking and seeing differently," she says. "I want people to really open their eyes to the beauty in their neighborhood. Even if you live in a deteriorating neighborhood, there is beauty all around you. And I firmly believe that when you see beauty, it opens up a place in your soul and I'm all about that."
