everyday heroes

Teaching the art of survival

May 11, 2006 2:44 PM

“Yo” by Chris Brown is throbbing out of small speakers hooked up on a stainless steel counter above a sign that says, “Attention Cadets: Do Not Go Into Kitchen Unless You Have Permission.” Another sign says, “Self Improvement Starts With Self Control.”

The cadets, who range from 14 to 18 years old, have served time for crimes like drug dealing, assault with a weapon, prostitution. Some have felonies and are on probation. All are finished with boot camp at Youth Leadership Academy in Kortright, N.Y. Now they’re here at the academy’s site in Bedford-Stuyvesant until they’re ready to go back to their neighborhood schools.

Some of the girls who wind up at the academy had been sexually abused since they were very young. When they realize they’re in a safe place surrounded by kind, trustworthy adults, they become the little girls they were never allowed to be and don’t want to leave.

While the class is creating stencils for a silk-screening project, some of the kids sway and sing to the music:

I want to be where you are
Ain’t nothing wrong with dancing
Baby it’s so romantic,
Baby, I can be in your heart.
So many things I want to tell you
I think that I should start by saying,
‘Yo.’

Their art teacher, MLJ Johnson, wearing jeans and his signature “YoPeople Art” sweatshirt, is keeping their energy together with his strong but laid-back presence. He keeps them focused through short-term projects with tangible immediate results. Silk-screening is perfect for that. Johnson is going back and forth between two tables of about a dozen boys and two girls, guiding, inspiring, encouraging, helping them with technique as they press down hard on a small squeegee and push ink through the fine screen.

“I believe in the apprenticeship system as a way of teaching,” Johnson said. He takes the kids through every step of the silk-screening process. And he’s part of the joy when kids see their drawing and words magically appear on a T-shirt that was once plain and is now suddenly cool: “I’m a Phenomenal Woman.” “Boy-Boy.” “I have A Dream.” “Only God Knows.”

“We have them six hours, the world has them for 18 hours,” Johnson said. True for any teacher to say about their students, but the stakes are higher for Johnson’s kids, who are beyond at-risk. They have already put themselves and others at risk on the streets of their world. Take Kelly, for example, who’s 16.
New York Teacher: How did your life bring you here to this point, to this place?

Kelly: I was crazy, shooting guns, carried a .40 cal’.
NYT: Why’d you carry?
Kelly: I needed more money.
NYT: What for?
Kelly: So I could buy me some sneakers. Some red-and-black Sprewells.
NYT: Did you get them?
Kelly: Yeah, I got them.
NYT: Did they change your life, make everything good?
Kelly: No.
NYT: Why?
Kelly: ’Cause the blue-and-whites came out.
Kelly says that the song he hasrelated to most is “Die” by Beanie Sigel:
I could die on death row, sentenced to the chair…
Die cuz I knew I shoulda laid that man,
Die cuz the cops tricked me ta say that, man,
Die cuz I hesitated ta spray that man
Die cuz I hesitated ta pay that man
Die cuz my man passed me a empty tool
Die cuz I panicked, I couldn’t keep my cool
Die cuz I mixed all them pills with Hennessy…
Die tryin’ ta seal the fate of my enemy
I could go out in a case of mistaken identity …

Kelly “was dealing drugs and stuff” to get the blue-and-white sneakers when he got busted. He said he felt almost glad that it happened because it brought him to the academy and to Johnson’s art class.

“It feels good here. It releases my strength and I can vent my feelings,” he said. “I’m stressed. I’m stressed about everything, everything in life. I’m happy and more relaxed here.”

Kelly, who wants to be a social worker now, is not the only kid in the room with newfound hope and with plans for college and living straight.
But Johnson knows how fragile those hopes and dreams can be against the realities of the kids’ lives. “As a teacher you have to impress them, have to have such a strong impact on them, to combat the other hours that the world has them,” he said.

The outside world has a limited claim on Johnson. A fine artist with many exhibits to his credit, he disappears into his studio at night to make art.
His paintings have a vitality and an edginess. The brushwork is aggressive and the palette is bright without being cloying. The neighborhood scenes walk the line between an apparent casualness and a vibrating paint treatment, keeping us on the edge of our seats. Johnson’s composition is sophisticated, holding the images to the canvas in spite of an implied disorder, sometimes even spilling over the edge of the canvas.

His art informs his teaching, and working with young people every day informs his art. “It keeps my ideas fresh and allows me to touch the pulse of what’s new and happening,” said Johnson, who won a UFT Career and Technical Education Outstanding Teacher award in February.

Johnson grew up on the Lower East Side and has been an itinerant art teacher for 15 years now, most recently with the Career Education Center based in Manhattan. He loves it. “It allows me to be creative and go around to all different locations and reach out to these kids,” he said. “I’m tired of seeing so many of the young people feeling lost and that they have no way out of a negative lifestyle.”

Carrying a large black portfolio filled with art supplies, he goes to homeless shelters where older kids are getting their GED, to small lock-down sites, to re-entry programs and, during some school years, to Riker’s Island. Whether it’s through silk-screening, painting, sculpture, sewing, knitting or making books or stained glass, Johnson can teach math, literacy, history and just about anything the task calls for.

At the Prospect Family Inn, a homeless shelter in the Bronx, he recently designed a project for Women’s History Month that had students researching on the computer, printing out a picture of their favorite heroine, transferring it onto a stencil for silk-screening. They found an appropriate quote and stenciled that under the portrait. The result was a roomful of students, aged 161/2 to 21, who were proud of mastering the academic and artistic skills it took to make T-shirts that were beautiful and whimsical with nary a misspelled word.

Always adapting to circumstance and forever inventive, Johnson brought some of the stenciled portraits made by these older, more technically adept students in the Bronx to the site in Brooklyn for the younger kids to use.

In the summer, you’ll find Johnson with some of his students making and selling T-shirts and small paintings at the South Street Seaport as part of his street-vending apprenticeship program.

“You draw in the crowd, put on a circus act with your art, then customers want to get something to eat and drink,” he said. “As long as you leave without leaving a mess behind, the shop owners love having you there.”

He set up the program so kids can put the entrepreneurial skills they already have to better use. “You may not think it but selling drugs takes a lot of entrepreneurial skill. If they were selling nice suits instead of drugs, they would make a lot of money, but the guy who has the suits won’t hire them. Within their communities, with dress, style and everything else, these young people know all the subtleties when they’re selling coke. You have to look a certain way, talk a certain way, move a certain way.

“First they’d have to be a suit to sell a suit. But even if they accepted that, if they dressed right, they don’t know how to present themselves, don’t have access, don’t have the acumen to sit for an interview and have that person see them as viable. A lot of people see these young people as non-persons. Then, when they don’t get that job, they get angry, their frustration level is high; they say to their teachers, ‘You lied.’”

Hence Johnson’s vending program, which serves as a bridge into the legitimate business world. “I teach them how to get a vendor’s license, where the wholesale outlets are. They’re so resourceful. They do research and often come back to me with information on outlets that sell T-shirts even cheaper than what I was buying them for.”

One of the high points of his teaching career happened late one night when he was alone packing up at the Seaport. He heard some voices calling, “Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson!”

“I got a little nervous. It’s lonely down there that late,” he said. “A former student from a lock-up facility was coming toward me with four or five big guys with him, so you can see why that made me nervous. They came over to me and my former student said, ‘We’re just leaving our spot at the Seaport and we got paper [cash]! I showed my guys what you taught me, Mr. Johnson, and that’s what we’re doing!’”

Now at the Bed-Stuy site, there are younger versions of that student calling out, “Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson!”

“Please come here, please help with this!” they call out. Strip away the toughness and they’re children, after all, vulnerable children, some of whom are so appealing they work their way into your heart. Isn’t he ever tempted to take them home and give them the love and parenting that they so hunger for?
“That’s the problem,” said Johnson, who over the years has legally adopted seven of his students. Add to that four natural children and three grandchildren and you can get a feel for the size of the Johnson family. “I love it,” he said.

Now the kids are tugging at his shirt, clamoring for his attention, his approval, his help. He gives it all generously. But Johnson has no tolerance for jail-like sayings on T-shirts and can smell out in a second if a kid wants a certain color of ink because of a gang affiliation. “Do me a favor and let’s not talk about flags now,” he said when one boy was angling for red ink for that reason. The boy got the message and chose another color.
And while Johnson is cool with kids relaxing to songs about “Nothing wrong with dancing, baby it’s so romantic,” he has no use for gangsta rap in his classroom. Outside in the world, Beanie Sigel can sing all he wants to about 70 ways for these kids to die. Indoors, MLJ Johnson is quietly, joyously, working over a silk screen, giving kids countless ways — and reasons — to live.

To see MLJ Johnson’s paintings, sculpture and wearable art, log on to yopeopleart.com or artafterdarkstudio.com.