Hansen: Laguna lives defined by a sense of place

The love stories started with children.

It was one year ago when artist Gretchen Shannon walked into the Laguna Beach Youth Shelter and asked teenagers to tell their stories through art.

They did not speak about pain or heartache or lost families. Instead, they spoke about love and hope.

“Every time I go in there, a lot of the kids have just arrived, and they’re in crisis, and they are shut down,” Shannon said.

But when she hands out supplies — scraps of paper, buttons, things discarded — the youths identify and open up.

“It’s always the same; it’s love and hope. They put that in everything,” she said. “They just went to town and really got very expressive. It’s really wonderful.”

Shannon decided to expand the visual storytelling program and offer it to a broader audience. So she approached the Laguna Outreach for Community Arts, which gave her a grant. During the past year, she has been working with the Laguna Beach Community and Susi Q Senior Center, and beginning March 28, the project will have its first exhibition.

In addition to the stories by the teens, the artwork includes seven stories from Laguna Beach senior women.

“I asked each person to tell their story of how they got here and what they thought of Laguna Beach, and it turned into love stories,” Shannon said. “There were a lot of dreams of living in Laguna Beach from humble beginnings. And they ended up here, which I thought was amazing. They were great stories.”

Shannon will display large panels along with a book of the compiled stories complete with a touch of visual art. One compelling story comes from Bobbie Clement, who described parents migrating from a cotton farm in Louisiana.

“In the 1930s, my parents’ family were sharecroppers on a farm in Shreveport, La.,” Clement wrote. “My folks were cotton pickers, working hard from before dawn to dusk, eking out a meager wage that barely supported their family.”

They moved to California in 1940, when Clement was only 18 months old, and stayed in “an abandoned, ramshackle old tire garage on East Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles.”

“The building was one large area with no bathroom, no windows, no heating source and minimal electricity,” Clement said. “The Red Car railroad tracks were only a few yards away. The noise rattled the old building day and night.”

A large pot at the end of the bed was used at night for a toilet.

Despite the circumstances, and after a move to South Central L.A., Clement went to school and eventually became a nurse at age 20. By 30, she was married with three daughters and living in a modest home there.

Then came visits to Laguna Beach.

“I still remember the rolling hills of Laguna Canyon Road, the smell of the sea and the sunsets over Catalina Island,” she said. “The seed of another dream was planted in my heart during those visits.”

It took several more years but she was finally able to buy a home in Laguna.

“What an amazing journey from a humble beginning in a rundown shack to a home with a view of forever,” she said.

It is these types of engaging, unexpected stories that define Shannon’s approach to art. Years ago, she gave up high-brow New York art in favor of something more community-oriented.

“I worked in New York with galleries, and I always found it to be, ultimately, unsatisfying,” she said. “I’m a storyteller. To me, art is a higher language. Art is a language that can go to another level, like music, and connect people and tell stories and get people’s attention and convey all kinds of things about culture.”

To get there, you need real time with people, particularly with children, she said.

“To really engage with people, I think you have to go into the community. You have to go on the street and have this direct engagement and have them really talk and respond and express the things they are struggling with — or their memories. Especially with the youth shelter and people in crisis, they want to tell their story. They want people to hear it and they want us to understand it.”

In addition to the community center showing, Shannon hopes to offer the exhibit to other civic locations like the library and City Hall. She also wants to add to the collection of stories.

These visual narratives, like patchworks of people’s lives, are only snapshots of a full life story, but they begin to build a picture of a community.

It takes a certain courage to open up your life and put it on display. But in the end, how better to mark it?

Many people define their lives by proudly pointing to their job titles. Others embrace the importance of their family legacy.

But for the people of Laguna, life dreams are explicably defined by a sense of place, purpose and hope.

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at [email protected].