MSU students and faculty work with Lansing children to create art in the Patterns of Place after-school program offered by the Reach Studio Art Center, located in REO Town at 1804 S. Washington Ave.
Paintbrushes and watercolor paints top the tables where Lansing elementary and MSU students sit side by side to make works of art in a collaborative after-school program.
Patterns of Place brings faculty and students from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, or RCAH, together with young Lansing students to create artwork. The Reach Studio Art Center, 1804 S. Washington Ave., in Lansing, holds the program. The program began this semester and the first session will end Sunday.
Alice Brinkman, founding director of the center and Patterns of Place project coordinator, said the program is about place.
“It’s about place, which has a very wide definition,” she said. “We thought initially about the place of the REO Town district. … We’re also looking at it as place for each individual and it may not be a physical place.”
Laura B. DeLind, a visiting assistant professor in RCAH, said the program helps young students in Lansing explore their communities.
“All of us together have been working with young artists in the REO Town area and helping them to use these artistic forms to explore their neighborhoods, to take a look where they live and perhaps see it in a new way and express it,” she said.
Arts and humanities junior Jessica Johnson acts as a mentor to the participants and helped lead a watercolor activity Tuesday.
“They seem to really want to be here and want to learn,” she said. “We’re technically considered mentors and I really can feel that that’s been … very positive.”
The Lansing students were asked to make watercolor pictures of where they play, Johnson said.
Lansing resident Allison Hopkins, 11, said she likes to paint and was looking forward to the day’s activity.
“I’m excited about coming and doing watercolors,” she said.
Arts and humanities junior Seth Anderson has been working with the kids throughout the semester.
“This seemed a little more on the creative side … doing art with kids; (it’s) something they were probably more interested in,” he said.
The Lansing students have been engaged throughout the semester, Johnson said.
“They seem to really want to be here and want to learn,” she said.
The students’ work will be presented in a professional way next year, DeLind said.
“(We will) have a public display in a very professional-looking venue for young artists so that their work is not seen as something to stick on the refrigerator, but is seen as something that is valid and beautiful and expressive in its own right,” she said. “That too is very exciting.”
The center provides resources young students might not have in their schools or their homes, Brinkman said.
“That’s really the whole reason why we exist here so that kids have (that) access to those resources those things that are different than they might get even at school,” she said.
Watching RCAH students working with kids has been special, Brinkman said.
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“That’s the other thing that’s very special about (this),” she said. “The kids just thrive from having that individual attention.”
The excitement and level of engagement is not surprising, DeLind said.
“All people given an opportunity to be creative and to use new materials and discover and explore the world around them will do that,” she said.
Every week has been exciting for the Lansing students, Brinkman said.
“I don’t think I’ve experienced a day when kids have (said), ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’” she said.
