From the Lansing State Journal, Thursday December 4, 2008:
Art from the heart: Refugee kids’ ideas shape mural
Matthew Miller
mrmiller@lsj.com
The cluster of children in the basement of Christ Lutheran Church weren’t shy about what they’d accomplished.
“I painted some bicycles,” said Isaac Fayia, an 11-year-old who had come to Lansing as a refugee from Liberia. “I painted a house. I painted the sun and the moon.”
They were waiting Wednesday night for the unveiling of a mural in a hallway on the upper floor of the church, near the offices of the Refugee Development Center, a bright rendering of the state Capitol with a river winding around it, of bicycles and birds, fish and people, houses and neighborhoods.
Many of the children from the Refugee Development Center didn’t speak English very well, he said, “and everybody had their own vision for what the mural should look like and different background experiences.”
But ideas emerged in conversation, in communication that sometimes involved smiles and gestures as much as words, said Virginia Borcherdt, an MSU senior who worked on the mural.
As for the children, and there was a rotating cast of perhaps 15 of them, “many of them have never had any experience doing any kind of formal art, so that was a huge benefit to them,” center Director Shirin Kambin Timms said.
And not just formal art, but art as a form of community activism.
Delgado said projects such as this start with an effort to bring art “out of the studio and into the real world, into the streets and classrooms and get people to make art together, to share their visions, their dreams, their hopes.
“It’s almost like having a conversation,” he said, “but it’s a visual conversation.”
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