Date: 2005-03-09
To: When you walk into RAW Art Works
Miles today: 0.0

Red curtains hang at the entryway to the studio space, each side emblazoned with dripping white letters: NO MISTAKES JUST ART. The same mantra is painted on the floor, two stories up. A big tentacled pink painted octopus stretches out on the floor. A mirror sits stuck on the side of a shelf, on which is scrawled in permanent marker in a loopy script, ¢You look marvelous.¢ The bathroom doors are all over painted. One says Sometimes Clean. The other says Often Dirty. A folding screen asks, up at the top, ¢What would your life be like without RAW?¢ Below, someone has written, ¢What would your life be like without a home?¢ Someone else has written, ¢You need a hobbie (sic))¢.Down a hallway, a chorus of voices is shouting, ¢Thank you, Susannah!¢The gallery across the hall is filled with the kids¢ latest exhibit, entitled ¢Route to Me.¢ Intended to employ notions of maps and journeys and traveling as metaphors for the kids¢ inner realities, the room is a maze of talking goddesses, eyes in rotaries, windows of adolescence, and a tree of life. Next to a city of cars, melting and upside down, hang topographical masks of faces and souls; next to these hang digitized self portraits, haunting and distant, exploring the divide between who the young men in the portraits believe themselves to be and the way others perceive them.On the film school floor, patchwork multicolored area rugs dot the floor, and a huddle of kids gather around an editing station watching their latest project: a hit and run chase scene involving a disgruntled Santa Claus and a very scared elf.***Lynn, Massachusetts is a small city north of Boston. Racially and ethnically diverse, one fifth of its families live below the poverty line. Once a factory city, Lynn¢s economic base was destroyed when manufacturers closed down or moved elsewhere; unemployment rates in Lynn are also well above the state average. Rates of substance abuse, crime, teen birth, and high school dropout are correspondingly high.There are five art teachers and nine school counselors in Lynn for fifteen thousand students.***RAW Art Works was started by three women ¢ Mary, Kit, and Beau - in 1988. Originally an offshoot of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services serving 16 teens, RAW now has its own building and serves over six hundred kids each year from ages six to eighteen. With the aid of six clinically trained arts therapists, RAW has, in their own words, ¢taken art into the streets, public housing, youth incarceration facilities, clinics, soup kitchens, schools and homes, as well as offering programming in our studio in downtown Lynn. RAW provides innovative ways for young people to engage in art-making that can and does transform their lives.¢Kit, Raw¢s Executive Director, remembers RAW¢s early days, when kids had to be at least nine years old to participate in RAW programming: "¢¦We would see these scrawny little kids, six and seven year olds, all dressed up in baggy clothes, swagger up to the van and tell us in fake deep voices that they were nine. "I'm nine!" And we'd say, "You're not nine!" and they'd be like, "But I'll be nine in two years! Come on, I want to go to RAW!" And we knew we had to expand the program.Now, a lot of these kids, they would come here five days a week if we let them. Sometimes they come by anyway ¢ ¢I just needed to get something!¢ ¢I just gotta show you something!¢ ¢I just gotta go to the bathroom!¢ Uh-huh. And you know, for some of them, it's like, they just want to go somewhere where someone's happy to see them after school. Or at all.¢***The programming has borne fruit. RAW kids have had artwork displayed at the Whitney and music videos played on MTV2; RAW itself has won a National Community Development Achievement award and the President¢s Coming Up Taller award; RAW has also been dedicated to providing public art. In their words. ¢We have painted large murals at Lynn Arts and at the Community Health center, designed billboards, painted trash cans for the entire city, designed and painted the entire delivery truck for the regional soup kitchen, and created set designs for the weekly local cable TV program on teen concerns.¢ ¢When the RAW Chiefs program was awarded the Coming Up Taller award,¢ says Kit, ¢we could have just brought one staff member and maybe a token kid, and that¢s what al lot of the other award recipients did, but that's not how we do things; we got five of our staff members and six of our kids and we took them all down to DC and we jumped on the hotel room beds and went to see art shows and when the awards ceremony came, the kids were all there, and all the other awardees, and let me tell you, our kids know how to work a room...at the most recent art show opening I had kids coming up to me, so importantly - "I just gave six interviews about my work!"With such passion coming from its staff, it¢s not difficult to understand why the space, when you walk into it, lives up to its name: overflowing with energy, infectious, wild -- raw. Click on the paintbrush to find out more¢¦