Flo Wong shows off artwork by one of her students.
By Anne Gelhaus
The last time Flo Oy Wong used a blue book, she wasn't sitting for a college exam. The Sunnyvale artist filled the book with images inspired by a racist encounter she'd had while walking her dog at a school near her home.
"These 6- and 7-year-old kids were yelling at me, telling me they hated me because I was Asian," Wong recalls.
Her artistic chronicle of the event was exhibited in a show at Godzilla of New York, a gallery run by the Asian American Art Association. She found the blue book project to be a positive expression of a negative event, the kind of emotional outlet she thought the troubled teenagers she was teaching through the ArtsConnect program needed.
The Arts Council of Santa Clara County founded ArtsConnect in 1989 to serve at-risk youth ages 5 to 18. Wong, one of four professional artists chosen to work with the program during the 1995-96 school year, designed a blue book project for 11th-graders at Calero Community School in San Jose. Although she originally wanted her students to explore their cultural heritage through the blue books, her concept of the project changed once she began working with them.
"It didn't work because they had their own mindset when I came in," Wong says. "It became a collaborative, negotiated effort."
Students used dry media--pencils, pastels, erasers and collage--to create the images in their blue books. While some of these images reflect the teens' personal interests and cultural backgrounds, many others represent their gang activities and drug use. Wong edited out the more overt references to the darker aspects of her students' lives before submitting the blue books to WORKS/San Jose, the gallery where they'll be exhibited in August along with works from the other three ArtsConnect projects.
Wong says the biggest difficulty she had in working with the Calero students was getting them to listen. She got a much better response when she approached them individually, rather than as a group.
"I'd go around to each student, asking, 'What does this mean to you?' " she says. "Little by little, they began to share their talent and intelligence with me.
"The more abstract I went, the freer they got with their expression," Wong adds. "It was through abstraction that they could really talk."
Some of the things her students have to say in their blue books are disturbing. When asked to depict their heroes, a couple of students made collages featuring Shoko Asahara, the Japanese cult leader whose group claimed responsibility for orchestrating the attack on a Tokyo subway station on March 20, 1995, in which 10 people died of sarin gas poisoning and about 500 were injured.
"Their heroes aren't people you'd find heroic," Wong says. "That's another reason why [the Arts Council] wanted to get us involved in the project: to provide more positive role models."
ArtsConnect program manager Eugenia Haney says that the artists provided the kids with role models who were expressing themselves in creative, nondestructive ways.
"We selected professional artists who had a history of working with at-risk kids. The combination is sort of unusual," Haney says. "The artists weren't stingy about sharing personal stories about how they became artists and what art means to them. That's important because it makes it real [for their students]. Flo was so giving in that regard."
Wong bonded with her students by telling them about her father being shot when she was just a year old and about getting a traffic ticket for driving alone in the carpool lane. She also taught them to read and speak phrases in Chinese and read to them from the Tao by Lao Tzu and from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison.
"I tried to tell them what it's like to be a professional artist, to know that you have something to say that's worthwhile," Wong says. "I tried to develop in them the confidence that they could do this."
Even though Wong had taught art in similar programs in San Francisco and Oakland, she says her experience with ArtsConnect was totally different than any she'd had previously.
"I never knew what emotional state the kids would be in," she adds. "We had lots of philosophical discussions between the moments when I wanted to pull my hair out.
"I began to see payoff in the last two or three weeks [of the program] after infusing them with my energy for five months," Wong says. "I always had a core of four to six students who were there with me."
When the in-school project ended, Wong invited these students to her studio in Sunnyvale's Raynor Activity Center, where they created large-scale collages with themes similar to those they'd explored in their blue books. There, Wong says, the teens were able to focus solely on their art.
"There was no one there to dis them or distract them from their work," she adds.
The results are both moving and intelligent. Among images of industrial-rock star Trent Reznor and drippings of colored ink, a young artist named Ray wrote: "The mind is a terrible thing to taste."
"I asked him if he knew he was a poet," Wong says. "He's got real talent: I'd be thrilled one day to say that I was his teacher."
The artists who teach through ArtsConnect lead classes once week for five months at various locations in the Santa Clara Valley. Wong says she sees a need for the program to be year-round.
"It's just a matter of funding," she adds.
The Arts Council based ArtsConnect, which is funded by the Valley Foundation, the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, on similar programs in Chicago and San Antonio.
"Nationally, there are extraordinary models," says program manager Haney. "The arts are being used on a large scale in after-school programs for at-risk kids. There's lots of money available for special populations but not for arts education in general."
Haney says children who are not at risk can still benefit from a program that presents art as a tool for building self-confidence and healing emotional wounds.
"They need positive forms of expression and self-esteem," she adds. "They need to control their expression so that it doesn't become self-destructive."
The ArtsConnect exhibit, titled "(Inside) Out," runs Aug. 1-31 at WORKS/San Jose, 260 Jackson St., San Jose. In addition to Wong's blue book project, the show will feature autobiographical masks made by residents of Gray's Group Homes in a workshop led by artist Frances Paragon-Arias; silk-screen works by residents of the Adolescent Residential Center, who learned the art from Carlos Perez; and a large-scale "funhouse" painted by residents of Eastfield Ming Quong, where Phil Rosenthal has been leading painting workshops for the past five years.
An artists' reception is set for Aug. 2, 7-9 p.m., at WORKS. Regular gallery hours are Tue.-Wed., Fri.-Sat., noon-4 p.m., and Thu., noon-7 p.m. For more information, call 295-8378.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, July 31, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.