We think the art is the thing we’re making, but sometimes the real thing is what gets left behind.
A couple of summers ago, I stood outside in the heat with a group of children, ages 7 to 12, at Northview Heights on the North Side of Pittsburgh. We were painting the Pittsburgh skyline.
I had designed the mural and brought the supplies, but it was never supposed to be my painting. The point was to make something together. At least that was what Fine Art Miracles had hoped when they brought me on as their staff muralist.
So I handed the children paintbrushes. Which, I have to be honest, isn’t always the easiest thing to do.
When you invite children into a large creative project, you are also asking yourself to release a certain amount of control. The paint is not going to land exactly where you imagined. Colors will overlap. Someone will inevitably make a choice you never would have made.
But when I designed the mural concept, I knew it would be a collaboration. I accounted for this, and I also know that something much more important happens when you stop trying to make everything perfect.
The children begin to understand that the painting belongs to them, too.
Fine Art Miracles documented that first day here: Muraling with Miss Jolene.
They asked me to come back
This summer, I returned to Northview Heights to work with the children again—this time overseeing the scenic elements for their production of The Wiz. That invitation meant more to me than they probably realized.
I have spent a lot of my life passing through places. Homes. Schools. Cities. Film sets. Jobs. Temporary rooms. Temporary worlds. You get pretty good at arriving. You also get used to leaving.
So there was something unfamiliar and lovely about walking back into Northview and realizing that I had not completely disappeared when I left the first time.
The children remembered me. I remembered some of them. The adults remembered what we had made together. There was already a history there. A small one, sure. But it existed.
I was no longer just some artist who had shown up one summer with buckets of paint. I was Miss Jolene.
There is something strangely tender about being remembered in a place you thought you had only passed through.
This time, I wasn’t designing a collaborative mural. I was helping them build a world for their play: The Wiz. The children were creating the environment in which their own story would unfold. At the end of it, they could look at the scenery and say:
“I painted that.”
There is power in that sentence.
It means: I was here. I helped make this. Something exists because I contributed to it.
That is exactly why it matters so much to me. When so much of life is temporary, making something gives us evidence. Leaving a mark, a real one like a painting or a mural. Something that says: you passed through here, but you were not invisible.
