Young Artists Bring Some Brightness to Downtown's Somber Family Court

An upstairs Family Court waiting room served as artist studio for Youth Apprentices. The mural they created was later hung in the courthouse's first-floor Help Center waiting room. The painting above is a Creative Art Works project completed in 2014. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

With brushes, paint and some whimsical ideas, a group of young people brought brightness and images of hope this summer to an often joyless Downtown institution.

Over the course of six-weeks, the 16-to-24 year-old Youth Apprentices as they’re called created “The Collective Dream,” a multi-panel mural that was installed this week in the first-floor Help Center of the New York County Family Court at 60 Lafayette St. The colorful imagery, evoking ideas diversity and hopes for family reunification, provides a stark contrast to the custody battles, foster care referrals, juvenile offenses and other tough circumstances that frequently bring people through the courthouse doors. (Adoption cases are the happier exception.) The works reflect themes that judges and other staff told the Youth Apprentices they would like to see, given the difficult missions faced by the court.

The mural project is a collaboration between Creative Art Works and the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program that for the past 15 years has placed art in the family courts of the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan. “The Collective Dream” is the first in the Manhattan courthouse to be installed in an area that is open to the public, and the fifth in the building made through the Creative Art Works program.

Arriving with a variety of backgrounds in art—some with none—the apprentices are first schooled in basic painting technique before coming up with preliminary design ideas that they pitch to the judges for approval. During the final three weeks, a large hearing waiting room serves as their studio for the realization of those ideas, pulled together by two professional teaching artists, Noga Cohen and Will Watson and teaching artist assisstant-in-training Maria Marquez, who work closely with the youth apprentices. 

On Aug. 15, at a ceremony in the fourth-floor courthouse library, the youth apprentices unveiled their work before an audience that included judges and other court staff.

“Most people who come here to use our courts aren’t happy walking through our doors. Sometimes people who come through our courts don’t even know why they have to be here,” Judge Karen Lupuloff, the court’s supervising judge, told the gathering. “But what they see when they enter our courthouse, with your beauty, with your art, is a welcoming, warm place, a place where they need not be afraid, a place where they can come and see art that’s beautiful and intriguing and interesting and hopeful and joyous.”

As for the artists, who apply through a lottery and earn a $16-an-hour minimum wage, the benefits “span the areas of social emotional learning, workforce training and experience, wages, and something to actually cite on your resume along with artistic and design skills,” said Creative Art Works executive director Karen Jolicoeur.

Several of the Youth Apprentices, like Gregory DeJesus, 16, from Brooklyn, said they are into digital art, but have had little or no experience with a paintbrush. “Working digitally, you use a slider to make a color,” DeJesus said. “This is my first time pushing my boundaries with painting, and I got really good at color mixing.”

Cristyana Navas, 19, a communication design student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said she hadn’t painted since high school and now does graphic design only on the computer. “It’s like a new learning experience,” she said. “I find painting comforting.” 

Being a teaching artist in the program is different from being an art teacher, said teaching artist Noga Cohen. “It’s more about the relationship with individual students and more about creating art with them and not just showing them how to make art.”

Those lessons, Cohen noted, go well beyond the mastery of technique. “Learning to appreciate art is a practice of appreciating life and appreciating the beauty in things, and being critical about the world that we live in.”

“That is so much more important,” she added, “than knowing how to paint.”