Lewis Center launches art-based community initiatives

The Lewis Center for the Arts has launched a series of outreach initiatives in its attempt to engage the Princeton community through the arts.

The initiatives, which include campus activities and “breakout” trips in collaboration with the Pace Center of Civic Engagement, are an attempt to allow University students to utilize their creativity as a means of civic engagement, according to the Lewis Center's outreach website.

“We want to bring the University students with at-risk kids in town and Trenton or Newark through the Lewis Center,” Fanny Chouinard, special outreach projects manager for the Lewis Center, said. “We want to the engage the community, especially children, through the arts, whether it be drawing, painting, creative writing and theater.”

One of the Lewis Center initiatives includes an upcoming screening of student-made documentary films on environmental preservation in Kenya. The films will be screened at the Arts Council of Princeton on Nov. 13 in collaboration with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

The Arts Council of Princeton is a nonprofit organization that supports visual, performance and literary arts.

Chouinard noted that the screening already has a large audience, which includes many kids participating in the Arts Exchange program in Trenton.

Arts Exchange is a program sponsored by the Arts Council that aims to provide art instruction and meals to children of low-income families.

The Lewis Center is currently looking to recruit students from assistant professor in the Program in Theater Brian Herrera’s CWR 340: Autobiographical Storytelling class, taught in spring 2014, to offer the children an introduction to Kenya and how the film was made.

Steve Runk, director of communications at the Lewis Center, explained that he and his colleagues wanted students who took the storytelling course to help children understand the documentary by putting it in simple terms.

Another ongoing effort by the Lewis Center has been collaborating with Triad House, a residential group home for teenagers with emotional and behavioral challenges.

Triad House allows for a safe and inclusive environment for youth of different sexual orientations, religion and ethnicities.

Adin Walker ’16 is working on a project to introduce the children at Triad House to Shakespeare plays, adapting the works to a language so they can be easily understood by children. Participating students will have about 10 workshops at the Triad House, where they will work with teens on theater, Shakespeare and other exercises.

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A performance is expected to take place on campus at the conclusion of the 10 workshops.

“I’m interested in finding new ways of imagining and re-imagining Shakespeare, and exploring these new ways together with the youth at Triad House,” Walker said.

Walker explained that he first approached Chouinard after an initial call for volunteers last semester. Since then, they have been working to adapt a Shakespeare play for children so that the children can understand what Shakespeare is about.

The Lewis Center is also interested in collaborating with the Pace Center to add a creative element to the Center’s already established volunteer opportunities.

“They’ve heard that we have students at the Lewis Center who are interested in doing volunteer opportunities and reaching out to the community utilizing the arts,” Runk said. “But I think what we’re trying to do is make more of those opportunities available, and we’ve been building these partnerships with social service organizations through the area so that our students can work with them and bring out their talents. Students want to do it and the community can benefit from it.”

Chouinard added that the Lewis Center hopes to have other volunteer opportunities in the arts available to students. She explained that the Lewis Center wishes to incorporate the arts more into Pace Center programs and use the programs as a basis for the Lewis Center’s new programs.

The Lewis Center is also looking into a partnership with the Eastern Service Workers Association, a group in Trenton that provides food and medical services for the poor, Chouinard said.

The organization assists resident with medical services and legal counseling in cases where housing and living utilities are shut off, and the Lewis Center is currently looking to recruit creative writing and theater students to help write statements to help the residents voice their cases in hearings.

The new outreach initiative has a wide range of events scheduled for the near future, Chouinard noted, including a creative poetry workshop in collaboration with the University’s creative writing faculty.

According to Chouinard, the Lewis Center also expects to have an open studio for visual arts students to display their works and allow the public, along with children from at-risk families, to meet with the students to discuss their art.