Art Program Challenges Young Offenders 'to Think' (Slideshow)

Creating poems, drawings and murals gives youth in juvenile hall a picture of themselves
By: Trey Bundy

I attended the opening of a powerful art exhibition a couple of weekends ago at a small gallery South of Market, but none of the artists showed up. Not that they didn’t want to come — they were all stuck in juvenile hall.

In a postmodern twist, a group of the artists kicked back inside one of the locked boys’ units at the Juvenile Justice Center near Twin Peaks last Sunday watching a slideshow of people looking at their work during the exhibition’s opening.

“Oh, that’s me,” said one of the boys when his drawing popped onscreen.

The exhibition, FACES…Behind the Wall, is put on by The Imagine Bus Project, an organization that brings art education to disadvantaged youth. TIBP’s Youth Studio program works inside Bay Area juvenile halls to help kids get a grip on themselves and their realities through the artistic process. The work in the exhibition ranges from self portraits to prose poems to a mural that took kids from JJC three months of weekly sessions to complete.

Teaching artists Seney Dennis, 38 and Malik Seneferu, 39, lead classes in the hall every Sunday afternoon.

“Some [of the youth] are really depressed and just want to be out of their rooms,” Dennis says of his students. “Some of them can’t concentrate, can’t focus, and I can’t blame them for that. A lot of them have been traumatized or abused.”

Dennis isn’t trying to cultivate the next generation of Picassos. Instead, he says, it’s all about the process: “A lot of young people haven’t been challenged to think. Creativity is about thinking. Critical thinking brings change.”

Inside the hall Sunday, the first young man to come out of his room and take a seat for the day’s session is 17 years old. Like all the boys on the unit, he’s dressed in a green shirt, pocketless tan pants and tan sandals with socked feet poking out. He missed the last three weeks of Youth Studio because of behavior problems and was unable to complete his piece in time for the exhibition.

“I’m back now,” he says to Seneferu. “It’s time to get finishing some art.”

I ask him if he was an artist before he came to JJC.

“Not really,” he says. “When you see a finished product, you think, ‘I could never do that.’ But brother Malik helps me go through it step by step.”

The rest of the group trickles in and watches the slideshow. Afterward, they gather at tables while Seneferu passes out photocopies of a skull. The boys are studying human faces and begin tracing them or drawing freehand. Three boys (two 17, one 19) share a table off to the side. They’re polite and focused on the work, but also razz each other like you might expect. As I’m writing down their ages, one boy points to the 19-year-old, laughing, and says, “He’s the oldest fuck in jail.”

If that fazes the 19-year-old, he doesn’t let on. He walks across the room and presses two sheets of paper against a window that looks onto a basketball court, using the natural light to better trace a skull.

At another table, a 16-year-old with heavy eyelids and an unruly grin is drawing tropical fish with a pencil, intricate shading standing in for bright colors. He’s also working on a picture of a teenage girl holding an infant to her shoulder. Next to the page is a photograph of the real girl and baby.

“That’s my girl and stepson,” he says.

He claims his current stretch is his fifth at JJC and that he’s spent a total of two years here since he was 13.

“I was an artist in school,” he says, “and when I got bored I’d start drawing.”

Later, a unit staff member walks up and catches the kid trying to hide a marker under a blank sheet of paper. When the marker is confiscated, the boy chuckles: “I can’t help it,” he says.

I ask him what he would have done with the marker had he not been caught.

“Draw probably,” he says. After a pause, his grin widens: “Okay, I’ll be real. I’d tag up the room.”

Seneferu stands at an easel, explaining the shapes that make up a face to the whole group, then stealthily slips in a life lesson.

“It’s good to draw something other than a self portrait so you can learn to see other people, to see outside yourself,” he says.

That’s the extent of his lecturing. He’s here to help them through the process of creating art, not to hit them over the head with didactic wisdom.

“I try to keep it as subtle as possible,” he says. “They’re already paying for what they did. People make mistakes.”

At another table, two 17-year-olds work on sketching and shading.

“I had some art classes in school,” says one, “but it was just another class to go to.” He wasn’t sure about Youth Studio at first but tried it as a way to kill time. “I wanted to see how it was, and it’s cool. It’s fun doing it and seeing your work.”

I ask the two young men about the hardest part of being locked up. “Missing family,” they say in unison, one adding that he has a kid on the way.

“Is this place dangerous?” I ask.

“This is day care,” says one.

When my eyebrows go up, he shrugs and says, “I’m just used to it. I’ve been here four times.”

He likes to draw “things for girls” like roses and other staples of tattoo art. I wonder aloud whether he’ll pursue art when he is released but he doesn’t know if he’ll end up in the adult system or move on to something brighter.

“You’ve got to beat the system, do productive things,” he says, using his finger and a little spit to carefully smear pencil marks inside the eye sockets of the skull he’s drawing. “You’ve got to reflect on what you do before and what you do when you get out. Try to do things better.”

I ask him what he misses most from home.

“This is home,” he says.

That’s the mindset Dennis and Seneferu are trying to crack.

“Identity is crucial,” Dennis says. “We didn’t say they had to draw themselves, but a lot of them did. For some young people, this is the closest they get to drawing themselves out of this reality.”

FACES…Behind the Wall runs Monday-Friday, noon-5 p.m., through Sept. 30 at TIBP Gallery (342 Ninth St., Suite 201, San Francisco).

Correction: In an earlier version of this column, the ages of Seney Dennis and Malik Seneferu were transposed. Dennis is 38 and Seneferu is 39.