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Downtown Aurora Visual ArtsThe simplest way to think of Downtown Aurora Visual Arts (DAVA) is as an art academy and exhibition space for middle-school students (almost all of them from nearby West Middle School), with sculpture, painting and computer art on offer. “But this is not a place where you’re going to see easels lined up in a row,” says DAVA Executive Director, Susan Jenson. “Although we definitely teach art basics, we have designed our programs to be relevant and interesting alternatives to other activities these kids could be involved with along the Colfax corridor, which includes drugs, tobacco, alcohol, gang activity.DAVA’s location in a former commercial building on Florence Street, one block off Colfax Avenue, is both geographically smart and symbolically apt. Both the school and the avenue have improved in the 12 years since DAVA opened, Jenson says, but it’s still true that some kids feel unwelcome in school and want to flee it at the end of the day. DAVA’s goal is to have them flock to their studios instead of the streets. Also lurking behind the art curriculum, is another not-so-hidden agenda: to teach kids the do’s and don’ts of becoming successful adults. The do’s include work skills like showing up, collaborating, and completing projects on time. The don’ts are obvious the moment you look at student work. In the computer studio, teacher Krista Robinson supervises students preparing an anti-alcohol exhibit by drawing and scanning nasty new labels for booze bottles featuring images like a fetus being poisoned. “We’re redesigning alcohol labeling to reflect what is going on,” Robinson says. Call it the deconstruction of destruction. In the drawing studio, meanwhile, seventh-grader José Flores puts the finishing touches on a smoke-belching factory to show that chemicals found in cigarettes are also found in industrial waste. “It might encourage people not to smoke,” José says. Substance abuse isn’t the only theme DAVA students tackle. A recent video project called Border Crosssings depicted the students’ experiences crossing actual and metaphorical boundaries; the show traveled to other area galleries. And there’s a drop-in art studio where kids who aren’t necessarily enrolled in one of DAVA’s more-formal programs can come unannounced in the afternoon and receive impromptu art lessons. Pavi Block, an 11th-grader at Aurora Central High School, has been coming to DAVA for six years, and now plays a supervisory role referred to as Junior Staff. “In school you don’t get breaks like here and in school you don’t get to pick what you do like here,” she says. Perhaps without realizing it, Pavi has described the difference between professionalism and labor. It seems like one of DAVA’s big themes – that true self-determination comes from using society’s rules, not flouting them – is sinking in. “I see kids coming here not just because they want to be artists, but because they want to learn and be in a safe, creative space where everybody’s input is valued. I actually think we’re helping prepare stronger lawyers, stronger civil servants, better restaurateurs,” Jenson says of the responsibility DAVA tries to instill. As a publicly-funded educational organization, DAVA does the requisite entrance interviews and exit interviews and satisfaction surveys to justify itself. In fact, an eight-year survey of DAVA alumni shows lower truancy, higher grades and more-negative views about drugs than in the general West Middle School population. But Executive Director Susan Jenson really knew the program was working when she overhead a girl who was participating in a student art show open up to her mom that a friend of the mom’s had once offered her marijuana. “The mother was dismayed and obviously hadn’t known that,” Jenson says. “The artwork gave the kid an opportunity to talk to the parent about a subject that clearly made her uncomfortable, and do it in a safe kind of environment where that conversation could take place.” |
