Youths Discover a Taste for Art

Proving to teenagers that there is more to Los Angeles than meets the eye is as simple as connecting the dots, an art group showed Wednesday.

Dozens of continuation high school students teamed up with professional artists to depict the city in a series of exhibits unveiled at a downtown landmark--Grand Central Market.

One group of San Fernando Valley youngsters used pointillism and picnic plates to map a community that they are learning extends well beyond their own neighborhood.

“Our city looks good. The reality is different from what you see on the news,” said Fernando Ponce, 17, of Van Nuys. “On TV, the city looks like a very sad place. But it really isn’t.”

Ponce and pupils from continuation schools in Panorama City and Van Nuys created a 10-foot map of Los Angeles using thousands of dots to outline the city, its mountains and coastal areas and its network of connecting roadways and transit routes. The small, colored dots were made by rubber stamps carved from gum erasers.

Wrapped around the map was a web of plastic picnic plates strung together and draped over a vacant Grand Central Market food stand commandeered for the students’ exhibit.

The 85-year-old market was picked for the weeklong exhibition because of its historic role as Los Angeles’ oldest open-air shopping spot, said Cynthia Campoy Brophy, director of the HeArt Project. It is a nonprofit program that for 10 years has conducted free arts workshops at Los Angeles continuation schools. Those campuses offer classroom instruction for teenagers who might otherwise drop out of high school.

Brophy’s program operates on a $300,000-a-year budget financed by grants and fund-raisers. Settings for students’ previous work have included art galleries, museums and libraries.

Continuation students from Echo Park, Atwater Village, downtown Los Angeles and North Hollywood produced exhibits Wednesday on the Ambassador Hotel, the historic downtown district and youngsters’ vision of a futuristic Los Angeles. Many of the shoppers who filled the market’s sawdust-covered floors paused to study the work.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry and school district Board of Education member Jose Huizar praised the teenagers. “Your view of the community gives us all strength,” Huizar said.

Santa Monica contemporary painter Carla Danes was one of the professionals recruited by Brophy to help with the project. It was Danes who had the Valley students pile onto the Red Line subway to explore the city before creating their dot map.

“It was the first time most of us had ever been on a train,” said Jose Gomez, 17, of Van Nuys. “L.A.’s bigger than I thought it was.”

Elizabeth Truong, 16, also of Van Nuys, said the exercise was an eye-opener on a smaller scale too, thanks to Danes and the dot-making.

“We didn’t know what this was going to look like. But she kept telling us that we’re not making a map, we’re making art. She was right.”