8: If You’re Not Letting Struggling Kids Make Art, You’re Missing the Boat

Episode 7: Barry Marcus - Creative Culture Dear Reader: Barry Marcus' story about Creative Culture touches on a number of questions related to the impact that arts learning can have on youth development. One of these is how active art making can strengthen a sense of ownership and agency in young artists. If this peaks your interest you might want to take a look at : 23 Admonitions, Insights and Ideas from the Great Masters at the Center for the Study of Art and Community's website.TranscriptBill Cleveland: Barry Marcus is clever, funny, and a good friend. He also personifies one of my favorite human characteristics; that's quirkiness. You never know what he's going to do, or say, or sing for that matter.Barry Marcus:The duck goes quack, the cow says mooI say hello, how do you do?You talk to me and I'll listen to youTalking and a squawkin’’ till our lips turn blue BC: Now, that's Barry singing the title track from his CD of children’s songs. These days, he describes himself as a visual storyteller. Back in the 90s, when I met him, he was not only a prolific songwriter, but also a therapist and a director of children's mental health programs. Although the first spark in our friendship was through music, our enduring connection has been fueled by our mutual passion for exploring the kinds of questions that have sustained our lives work and giving rise to this podcast. Namely, can the creative process be a potent force for healing and change, and if so, how do we do that really, really well? From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story, Change the World and I’m Bill Cleveland. We're calling today's episode creative culture, and today's conversation with creative culture, facilitator, and advocate Barry Marcus took place during May of 2020. For myself in Alameda, California and Barry on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, we were coming to the end of our third month living at the intersection of six feet and Sequesterville.Part One: Rhythms and Seasons. With your permission, I would like to ask you to recount a piece of your history. A focus of bringing creative process to bear on very difficult circumstances, particularly for young people that you were serving at the place called Families First. Would you be willing to talk about how it came about, how you came to it, and what happened?BM: Well, can I give a little prelude to that? You know, I was at the Sacramento children's home for 13 years prior to that. And because of my role as one of the directors, holding the position of intake, and seeing how people translated what an intake summary looked like into their day to day residential care. These kids were 24 hours a day in the care. In both circumstances--the children's home and Families First--these are kids that blew out of foster homes. Multiple, five, seven foster homes are had very acute and dramatic needs to be removed. They were in institutions, and the people that worked with them primarily besides the clinical step are really the line staff, and they're called childcare work. And they would look at an intake summary, and they would see this description of a troubled child, most often, behaviorally, because that's how children experience trauma, and they would define them by their deficits. So, the first thing I did was I created a thing called “guess who's coming”. Instead of saying, here's this broken-down kid and that's it, I said, here's the profile of our newest guests. And the first they thought it was a joke, but it said, Oh, no, I want you to treat this child like a guest. So, in essence, what I really knew was that these children could be relegated to the garbage basket, as soon as they entered the door or sometimes even before. I was recruited as a creative person. What I wanted to do is use the institutional setting as a community of creativity, and use the children's lives and their brokenness, his deep feelings, to connect to a creative process that could allow them to be seen different, and experienced different, and seeing themselves different.BC: So, what I'm hearing is that Families First was really a golden opportunity to integrate your ideas about using the creative process as a healing force for these kids. BM: I did some things that children's home, as I said, the “guess who's coming”, but the transition was the CEO of Families First said, “I just want your creativity.” You figure a way to do it. Now I had done a song site called “Our stuff, our song” and it was helping children create their song individually, then bring it together as a group and then bring it to a public a community parents, family, mental health associates, but also the outside community, to give them a chance to give voice to their inner being as an artist. I had a band learning their songs, and I brought them all together to practice, and then the performance became a ritual and a rite of passage, which I always incorporated and all the work I did is as that community, a living and breathing community, and having rituals and rites of passage. We had this amazing drumming thing with a Ghana drummer, and what the kids created was these chants and narratives with reused plastic water bottles as drums, and they were painted and adorned in various ways, and we had a public ceremony and it was really profound and deep and rich. BC: Could you describe how creative culture manifested, first of all, and also describe Families First, what its mission was, who its clients were... BM: Well, Families First started out as a professional foster care program, and kind of blocks them while I was there growing into a more of a residential treatment program with foster care. It was a range of service program. But what fascinated me about it, as did Sacramento Children's Home was it was its own community, with its own values, its own rhythms, its own kind of timing and seasons in the life of a child who live there. Now, before I say anything more about that, who lived there?Again, these were kids in and out of places like Napa State Hospital. So, they would get in a hospital for all kinds of sometimes it was psychotic, but very often it was assaultive behavior. That parents and other foster family stuff that couldn't handle or was runaways. Now, an interesting aside about runaways, we learned in the 70s that girls… well, they were considered offenders only as teenagers, they wouldn't have been charged with crimes for what they did if they were adults. And the crime was they ran away, while we began finding out why girls were running away, and really (…not sure word…) they were molested, and that was your only way of dealing with it. So, these were kids that were used to their energies being coming and going, running, and having no sense of permanency. And the residential treatment home, particularly Families First said, we're going to stick with this kid unless it gets really, really dangerous because we know the next step from us, is an inpatient Napa State Hospital, a warehouse still. And we make a commitment to work with the child, and when there was the family, but in the circle of having the community and the physical ground, I recognized the structure was {…} it was like in a Eureka kind of moment. We had individual kids working on their individual stuff, they lived in individual houses, up to 12 kids. So, you had a child who was a member of a group, not only were they a member of the group, they went to the on-campus school, and so they were a member of a class, but together they were all Families First. BC: This facility had many components to it. It had an educational component; these kids lived with each other. They had activities all day, they had counseling, talk about how creative culture really meant that creative process was integrated into every aspect of their time in the facility.BM: Culture is a very big important word in this situation, because it's this kind of inbred system of “this is appropriate, and this is not appropriate”. And by the way, “appropriate” is a power word. Who determines “appropriate”?, you know, I mean, there are conventions, but again, I don't want to do anything appropriate. But what I was trying to point to is, regardless of whether you see the whole fabric or not as a childcare worker dealing with a kid spitting at you, you're still in a culture. This is a culture, and we have the opportunity to both define it and refine it by looking for the creative juices because even as a mental health facility, the only way you solve problems is to be creative. The only way you connect with other people is to create that energy. So, I was also asking staff to stand back a little and give themselves a chance to look at kids as creative. Eventually, one of my favorite projects, and actually this is with Oprah, […] we were able to have Oprah come and see them and say, you know, the difference between you and me isn't where I started, It's where I am now. And that happened to me, and the arts, and expression leads me to healing. So, I saw that as an opportunity to build great of culture where the...