Bucks Artists Create Summer Camp on Philly Street Corner
Bucks County Courier Times
By Elizabeth Fisher, August, 1995
There were no walls in the art gallery on Cambridge Street last week. There was no “best of show.”
The exhibition hung, with the help of a clothespin, on a cyclone fence in a littered, vacant lot. And this was no wine-and-cheese affair; the reception for the 32 artists, ranging in age from 4 to 13, featured pizza and soda.
The Friday reception was the culmination of a 10-day arts camp held near 19th Street in Philadelphia, where Bucks County volunteers did battle with traffic noise and heat to help city youngsters learn the basics of art.
Armed with brushes, paints, construction paper, and scissors, Cindy Spiers, of Washington Crossing, and several other volunteers, traveled to the “classroom,” located one block from Girard Avenue.
Their payment was simply watching and feeling the energy from their students, some of whom had never wielded a brush or cut shapes from paper before.
“There was an energy with these kids. They wanted to get involved in everything. Once you got them started, a lot of them didn’t want to stop to move on to another project,” Spiers said.
On the first day, the budding artists were asked to color in a picture of their favorite summer activity. Most drew a swimming pool. They were so intense that many actually drew in markers indicating the various depths of the pools.
Later, they drew pictures of what they thought they’d look like if they were Martians. Some were orange, some green, and a few were a mixture of colors, Spiers said.
Like every respectable Martian, they sported spiky ears. But most had human faces, and, in one self-portrait, the Martian wore a baseball hat.
Spiers, 42, is a self-employed artist and a recent graduate of Trenton State College. She is married and has two children, one of whom, her 17-year-old daughter, Nikki, was among the volunteer teachers.
Spiers got the idea for the project through Landmark Education, a San Francisco-based organization that features leadership programs. The location for the art camp was chosen through a priest at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Yardley who has contacts in Philadelphia.
A visitor to the camp on Friday, the last day of the project, described the children as very affectionate toward their teachers and very sad to see them leave.
But Spiers is already planning for next year, when she hopes to have more helpers so she can break up the classes by age groups.
“These children came away knowing that art can be fun, that you can mix all kinds of colors to make another color. By the last day, they were very quiet,” Spiers said.
Reprinted from The Bucks County Courier Times, August, 1995.