Troubled teens express pain through art

BATH – Self-portraits from troubled teenagers will go on display for the public next week, part of a program sponsors say show what troubled youths can accomplish when given a chance to express themselves artistically.

The eight-panel portable mural will be unveiled at 10 a.m. Monday at the Cole-Haan headquarters off Route 1 in Yarmouth.

The mural will remain at Cole-Haan until mid-July, then go on display at the Sagadahoc County Courthouse in Bath, the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland, Morse High School and the Maine College of Art in Portland.

The mural is being stored at The Park, a new skate park and teen center in Bath.

“I can escape from everything that is bothering me. Art is like meditation,” said teenage artist Justin Smith, who is getting addiction counseling.

In January, Martha Miller, a 49-year-old student at the Maine College of Art, came up with an idea for her internship with MECA’s Creative Community Partnerships program. The program, founded in 1989, links undergraduate art students with public schools, some of which have no art programs or limited resources.

The program has been used extensively in Portland’s elementary and middle schools, at Durham Elementary School and in island schools on Vinalhaven and North Haven.

Miller proposed taking groups of troubled teenagers and guiding them through the process of creating a public art project. She viewed the idea as a way to expose the students to art and let them express their inner feelings of frustration and anger.

Miller worked in collaboration with West Bath District Court’s drug court, Very Special Arts, the Sweetser social services agency and the corporate sponsor, Cole-Haan. They identified eight youths who had either been sentenced to do community service through the drug court or been referred by Sweetser.

Each of the eight panels is 4 feet wide and 6 feet high and each teenager was responsible for painting a panel. The completed mural will be called “Abandoned.”

The panels include a fairy sitting in a field with marijuana weeds on its arms, and a haunting image of a girl’s face lost in a sea of blue paint – an image inspired by the artist’s sense of inner confusion. Another artist used an array of colors in images of people, to prove to her mother that she is not racist.