How a Revered Studio for Artists with Disabilities Is Surviving at a Distance
By Dan Piepenbring
September 24, 2020
Zina Hall, a textile artist, has worked at Creative Growth for fourteen years. “Just sew,” Hall said. “That’s what I do.” Photographs by Carlos Chavarría for The New Yorker.
Zina Hall used to be the first artist through Creative Growth’s studio doors each morning. She’d have the Oakland paratransit bus drop her by the nearby Whole Foods around eight. Then she’d walk down 24th Street to get a little exercise, passing condos, construction sites for more condos, and, on the sidewalks, fragrant lemon bottlebrush trees with scarlet flowers. Soon the center would rise in front of her: a squat, red brick building, formerly an auto-repair shop, with a stately vertical marquee that gives it the charm of an old movie house. Drawings and paintings crowd the plate-glass windows, clamoring for the attention of passersby; around the corner, hand-laid brick planters host a garden of succulents. Hall’s friend Charlotte Moses, one of Creative Growth’s client-care specialists, would sometimes let her in before the 8:30 open time. Hall, a textile artist, would help set out chairs at the long worktables; as soon as she could, she’d take her usual seat and immerse herself in work. A lover of Motown, she often had her headphones on; some of her embroideries feature Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and other lodestars. She’d pause only when necessary. “Just sew,” Hall told me recently. “That’s what I do. At break time, I usually sew during my break.”
Hall, who is fifty-six years old, with kind eyes and a gap-toothed grin, is a professional artist with a developmental disability. For fourteen years, Creative Growth, a nonprofit gallery and studio, has been a vital part of her life—a center of calm, a locus of community, an incubator of her talents. The studio’s twelve thousand square feet accommodate painting, drawing, woodwork, ceramics, textiles, and rug-making. In its capacious, open space, garland lights arc across the ceiling, over a ladder, a dress form, and high shelves laden with colorful supplies; the room, depending on where your eye alights, evokes a blue-chip gallery, a secret laboratory, or a garage sale. Since its founding, in 1974, Creative Growth has garnered a reputation for its amorphous methods of nurturing talent and for the calibre of its artists, some of whom—Judith Scott, Dan Miller, Donald Mitchell, and John Martin—have found international success. (Lawrence Rinder, who recently stepped down as the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, told the Times Magazine in 2015, “I was the dean of an art school for four years. If we had the same percentage of success, we’d be the best art school in all of history.”)
Above all, though, Creative Growth is a place for artists with disabilities to gather, work, talk, and think without fear of reproach or dismissal. In 1974, the organization’s founders, Elias Katz and Florence Ludins-Katz, opened the studio in response to the closure, in the sixties, of many of California’s psychiatric hospitals, which caused a spike in the number of homeless and incarcerated people with disabilities. A thriving arts center, the Katzes wrote, would demonstrate that such ostracized people “not only belong in the community but should be active members of the community.” At the outset, the Katzes ran Creative Growth out of their garage, in Berkeley, spreading the word with lectures and workshops throughout the region; as early as 1973, a reporter from the Ukiah Daily Journal marvelled that “unbelievably beautiful” artworks made during a workshop run by the Katzes “closely resembled the work of famous artists. Some were even more expressive.”
Amy Keefer, a textiles-studio instructor, is one of many at Creative Growth who began delivering supplies to artists during the pandemic.
John Martin, an artist who has practiced at Creative Growth since 1987, took to working outdoors near the studio as the pandemic wore on.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, some of Creative Growth’s artists—there are at present more than a hundred and fifty—had been going to the studio every day for nearly its entire history. When, on March 16th, six counties in California’s Bay Area ordered nonessential businesses to close and residents to shelter at home, the ecology that the space has nurtured over decades was disturbed overnight. Elizabeth Brodersen, the group’s executive director of little more than a year, told me that, in the days before the official shelter-at-home order, she and her colleagues—a staff of thirty-one—had recommended that older artists and others at high risk for the virus work at home, but many of them continued to show up anyway. “Some of our folks don’t really understand why it’s happening, or why they feel shunned,” Tom di Maria, who served as Creative Growth’s executive director for twenty years and is now its director of external relations, said. “People who live in the neighborhood will walk by and look in, and they don’t understand. That’s been a difficult dynamic to watch.”
Hall now spends her days at her sunny home in Oakland, where she lives with her twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Myeisha, who’s also her caregiver. Every day in April, Myeisha said, she told her mother to write on her calendar, “It is not safe to go outside yet.” Hall, who was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, speaks with a relaxed Southern accent and a humble, forthright style. “I need to get back there so I can finish doing what I gotta do,” she said. “I can’t sit up in no house.”
As their artists endure month after month of quarantine, Creative Growth faces an extreme version of the dilemmas that other arts organizations and educational institutions have struggled with during the pandemic: if your purpose is to foster the ideal conditions for learning and making things together, how do you proceed when those conditions are suddenly impossible? The studio has answered in ways inventive, nimble, and enlivening. As soon as Creative Growth shuttered, Brodersen said, “We just started calling everybody. That was the first thing: call the artists, find out what they’re doing, find out what they need, make sure they’re O.K. where they are, and let them know that we’re thinking about them.” Some artists didn’t have Internet access; others lacked computers. Creative Growth arranged for drop-offs of personalized supplies, including everything from paper and paints to embroidery hoops and rug-making tools. Hall has received a light box, clothing, textiles, and abundant sewing and drawing materials. “Staff members just stepped up and said, I’ll go to this house, I’ll go to that house,” Brodersen said.
The heart of Creative Growth’s response to the pandemic is a series of daily Zoom classes, where artists can release the flood of affection and frustration that would otherwise remain dammed up indoors. “Almost overnight,” Brodersen said, the staff developed a slate of programming that includes workshops devoted to poetry, watercolors, dance, textiles, yoga, sculpture, comics, and meditation, and tea time (“no art materials required. Join with your favorite tea, beverage, or nothing at all!”). If most Zoom meetings are characterized by distraction and unbridgeable distance, the Creative Growth workshops, which run from sixty to ninety minutes, are studies in focus, enthusiasm, and collaboration. Instructors prepare virtual field trips, readings, discussion questions, and time-lapse videos to demonstrate technique. Separate staff members provide real-time A.S.L. interpretation and closed captioning; staff can slip into breakout rooms with anyone having a hard time.
At the start of a recent session on landscape painting, each new face onscreen set off a chorus of greetings. The instructors, Meadow Presley and Veronica Rojas, had gone to great lengths to make the classes playful and inviting. Rojas, wearing pendulous earrings, appeared against a background image of the Kenai Fjords; Presley against a sun-bleached desert stippled with cacti. “I think we’re all getting better at this, huh?” Rojas said.
When the Zoom grid had grown to about thirty artists, Presley shared her screen and, using Google Arts & Culture, embarked on a virtual tour of America’s national parks. The class watched a volcano erupt in Hawaii and got a primer on hoodoos, the craggy spires of rock, at Bryce Canyon National Park, in Utah. “Desert sky super cool,” the closed captioning read. The tour concluded in Seoul, at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, where Presley enthused over the work of Yoo Youngkuk, a twentieth-century painter who abstracted Korea’s undulant horizons into vivid shapes and planes. “What I really like about his landscapes is how simple they are,” Presley said, “and how he doesn’t necessarily use the colors that you see in reality.”
When the tour was finished, Rojas, using a time-lapse video, demonstrated a few rudimentary painting techniques: spraying the paper with water before adding paint, using salt crystals to soak up excess moisture, adding a horizon line. It was time to work.
“I like this class the best because watercolor, it’s great for emotion,” Jason Jackson, a painter, said. “It’s great for releasing emotion.”
Monica Valentine, a blind artist, was making a large, elaborately textured purple cube—beaded sculpture is her signature medium. “Mel?” she said, raising her hand and addressing Mel Lister, one of four staff members on the call. “I have a question. Are you gonna bring me reflectors sometime?”
“Once we go back to Creative Growth,” Lister said, “of course, we’ll all bring each other presents. But we don’t know—”
“When is it gonna be open again, Mel?”
Cristina Moraes, who was interpreting the class in A.S.L., said, “We don’t know for sure yet, O.K.?”
“Yes. I miss the program, Cris,” Valentine said.
Soon the talk fell away, replaced by the ambient noise of people at work. Zoom calls sometimes make a pretense of insulation, each participant sealed in a makeshift “home office,” that contradiction in terms. Here, as everyone painted, domesticity permeated the scene. Lauren Dare, a painter and woodworker clad in purple overalls, drummed her hands on her lap. Someone burped. A glass clinked. Someone apologized for burping. (“S’cuse me.”) Valentine whistled while she worked on her cube. A brief exchange in Spanish flowed and ebbed. A landline rang. The thirty rooms onscreen had coalesced into a single place.
After about forty minutes of quiet, the artists held their paintings up one at a time so that the instructors could take screenshots. Dare had made an abstract rainbow, a maelstrom of prismatic color saturating the paper. Another artist had painted the hoodoos below a steep cliff, with a skewed perspective that reminded Presley of a Road Runner cartoon. Others evoked fish, mountains, windsurfers, sailboats, mountains, orchards, and volcanoes spewing gobs of lava, many of these in the distilled style of Youngkuk. Tanisha Warren, who makes textiles and drawings, was joined by her hamster, Charlie Brown; Warren showed a range of pink and blue mountains against an umber sky, where a fluorescent sun shone on a doghouse labeled “Dog House.”
“I love those shapes. They have movement,” Presley said. “The colors are amazing. I would do a whole series of these. Once this class ends, work, work, work, work, do more.”
“I have to do house chores, too, you know,” Warren said.
“Well, stop the house chores and start painting!”
Creative Growth’s artists have a resilience particular to those who move through the world with a disability. “Our people are so strong—they’ve been dismissed so often that they’ve found a way to survive,” di Maria told me, adding, “What many people right now are struggling with—‘What do you mean I can’t go to a restaurant? I can’t go to a birthday party?’—many of our people have grown up with that being the rule of their lives.” For older generations accustomed to life on the margins, reporting to the studio each day was a hard-won marker of autonomy. Many of them, di Maria explained, had grown up effectively sheltering in place. “They weren’t supposed to be in the world. They were supposed to be institutionalized, they were supposed to be in homes,” he said. “And the Creative Growth community offered them this other way out.”
Chandreve Clay is the executive director of Clear Creek Services, a nonprofit that runs several group homes for people with disabilities in the Bay Area. Three of her residents, including her aunt, Maureen, are Creative Growth artists. Before the pandemic, the trio would spend at least two hours on the bus every day commuting to the studio and back. All of them, Clay said, have registered its acute absence in their lives, asking her “every hour” when they’ll be able to go back. “Maureen announced to me on Saturday that she was going to program tomorrow,” Clay said. “And I’m like, ‘Sweetie, program’s closed, and tomorrow’s Sunday.’ ”
Another resident, Daniel Hamilton, has practiced with the group since 1975, longer than anyone else—longer, even, than the current studio has been in existence. Without access to the studio’s kiln, he can’t work with ceramics, which helped him release stress. “I had tried buying him modelling clay, and he just will not agree that that’s an acceptable substitute,” Clay said. He used to go visit his elderly mother most weekends; over the phone, Clay had tried to teach her to use Zoom or FaceTime—to no avail, leaving Hamilton without a way to see her. “It’s been very hard on him,” Clay said. “He wants nothing more than for me to take him to Jack in the Box, and he can’t even do that. He’s had the same coupon for the last three months.”
Depending on where your eye alights, the studio evokes a blue-chip gallery, a secret laboratory, or a garage sale.
In the studio’s capacious, open space—closed since March—garland lights arc across the ceiling, over high shelves laden with colorful supplies.
“The uncertainty is the most challenging thing right now,” Elizabeth Brodersen, Creative Growth’s executive director, said. “How do we come together to support the artists and each other through this next year?”
The three artists like to commandeer one of the home’s large kitchen tables as a makeshift workstation immediately after breakfast and work there all day. “They will help people get their dishes off the table sooner so that they can have that space,” Clay said. During their Zoom classes, Clay makes sure there’s someone on staff to sit with them and help keep them focussed. But it’s one thing to make such arrangements for three months, five months, seven months—and quite another to make them semi-permanently, with no indication that normalcy will return anytime soon. Creative Growth is situated in Alameda County, which has seen the most cases of coronavirus in the Bay Area, with nearly twenty thousand since March; the county’s interim public-health officer has warned that autumn and winter may bring still worse conditions. “I see these fully functioning adults out in the world having a meltdown because you have to wear a mask,” Clay said. “And I’m, like, ‘My residents don’t even understand, and they’re isolated and trapped, and you are out in the world and you can’t wear a mask?’ It’s so heartbreaking to see what the residents are going through.”
“The uncertainty is the most challenging thing right now,” Brodersen said. “How do we come together to support the artists and each other through this next year?” In May, she feared that California’s state budget would slash Creative Growth’s funding, along with that of other providers of programming for people with developmental disabilities—a crisis averted, in part, through devoted advocacy by the intellectual- and developmental-disabilities community. Without adequate federal support, though, California’s budget may change, especially as the state faces devastating wildfires and high unemployment. Creative Growth’s other sources of income—art sales, donations—are no more certain, and, funding aside, it’s not clear that the regimen of online courses will serve the artists well in the long term. Just as modelling clay is no substitute for the tactility of bona-fide ceramics, the Zoom classes, no matter their rewards, can’t replace the ambience of the studio, where so much depends on proximity, on happenstance, on touch.
At home, Hall spends most of her day sewing in her bedroom, where she still listens to Motown, as she has since childhood, through headphones or on a boombox. She’s surrounded by old family photos, which serve an integral role in her artistic process. Using a Sharpie and a light box, she’ll trace the silhouettes of old pictures onto fabric and then hand-stitch the details in a deep, variegated palette. Her needlework, in its texture and asymmetry, resembles mosaic tiles. She draws on images of the past—of her parents and her husband, all deceased; of musical performers and TV shows like “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons”—in a way that suggests intimate conversation more than nostalgia. Just as early filmmakers smeared Vaseline onto the camera lens to achieve a soft glow, Hall’s embroideries, which have been shown at the nada and Outsider Art Fairs, cast her memories through a dense, exultant light. (Her work appears in an exhibition at Summertime, a Brooklyn gallery, through November 7th.)
“Since the age of twenty—I’m twenty-seven now—I’ve been my mom’s sole caretaker,” Myeisha Williams, Zina Hall’s daughter, said. “And being able to learn from her more, and just getting to know her better and experiencing her more has been nothing short of a joy for me.”
Myeisha, who just earned her master’s degree in public policy, has relished the chance to spend more time with her mother, even under the constraints of the lockdown. “Since the age of twenty—I’m twenty-seven now—I’ve been my mom’s sole caretaker. And being able to learn from her more, and just getting to know her better and experiencing her more has been nothing short of a joy for me,” she said, her voice wavering. “So, if anything, I always ask her, like, ‘Mommy, let me know when I’m getting on your nerves.’ ” As at the studio, Hall rarely pauses from her work. Without the time it takes to commute, she’s able to start around seven in the morning; if she’s waiting on a fresh batch of supplies, she’ll do crossword puzzles to keep her mind agile. Whenever an artist completes a work, someone from Creative Growth arranges to pick it up, for safekeeping. Ellen York, a gallery assistant, said that Hall was one of the first to submit new work when the lockdown began. York recalled opening a butcher-paper bag to find the hand-stitched visage of Barry White staring up at her.
For original article, visit newyorker.com.