Clark Students and the Boys and Girls Club Present “Street Art: A Portrait of Main South”

By Rachel Bryson-Brockmann

Three young boys stand in formation on the front lawn of a typical Main South row house. One stares calculatingly into the camera, while the other two, who are equipped with toy guns and knives, avoid the camera’s gaze. The boy with the gun dons a bright red cowboy hat. This is just one of the many compelling photographs that was displayed recently at an exhibit entitled “Street Art: A Portrait of Main South.” The exhibit was a team effort between Clark University and the Boys and Girls Club of Worcester, who joined forces on a project entitled “Main South Speaks” to uncover their thoughts about inhabiting Main South, an area been notoriously known as the worst part of Worcester. A few months of collaboration resulted in an exhibition of photography, graffiti art and video that was held on Friday, December 14 from 6-9pm at Clark University.

Sarah Michaels and the eighteen students in her first year seminar class “Communication and Culture in Main South” had been visiting the Boys and Girls Club in Worcester once a week since September, running the “Main South Speaks” program. The students work together with about fifteen local youths ~ ranging in age from ten to eighteen ~ who elected to take part in the project.

The project started out simply as a street photography unit, with the local kids showing the Clark students around their neighborhood, armed with disposable cameras. Litter, graffiti, and the abandoned warehouses in the area were the common subjects at first, but the group also came to capture the more traditionally beautiful sides of Main South: children playing in their front yards, light streaming through factory windows, and reflections in the University Park pond. Stephen DiRado, the Photography Program Director/Studio Lecturer in Photography at Clark University who has been exhibiting his work since 1983, came to the Boys and Girls Club one week and explained elements of photography to the group. He continued to help with the final selections of photographs displayed in the exhibit.

The project morphed to include graffiti art done on planks of wood, with the instructive help of local artist Ali Bomba, who refers to himself as a “composer / producer / multimedia artist / graffiti villain.” The group spray-painted the wood with images ranging from political messages of an American flag encircled by figures holding hands and an image of the Twin Towers to less controversial but equally moving colorful scribbles and unique, Picasso-like faces. There was also a video that played during the exhibit that depicted graffiti in the Main South area. Created by Clark student Sam Shepler, it brought colorful, artistic graffiti alive and had an upbeat soundtrack that set the mood of the event.

“This project has been designed to give a bigger voice to the residents of Main South, and to build bridges across the divides that exist between Clark and the neighborhood,” said Sarah Michaels, the Clark professor who organized the entire project. Supplemental to this project is the website MainSouthSpeaks.com, which was created by Timothy Dzurilla, a Clark alumnus, in 2005. The purpose of the website is to cross the border between Main South residents and Clark University through photography, video and cultural events, and urging everyone to “…speak for yourself.”

Mike Harris, a Clark student who was the head of the street photography unit, describes the collaboration: “In the beginning, we all were just going through the motions. But as the film ran out and our time with kids ran out, our efforts become much more focused. The kids of Main South started looking at their world and reproducing it to show us their view and we started paying more attention to the strengths of these kids as they took us and their work to heart.” John Dutton, another Clark student, adds that it wasn’t so easy at first: “At first, it was very chaotic at the Boys and Girls club, and it was difficult to see what we were trying to accomplish. But as time went on, and we had a firm goal in our minds of a final art exhibition, things fell into place and we worked as one, fluid group.”

This isn’t the first year that the Main South Speaks project has been implemented, but it’s the first time that an exhibition of this magnitude was put together, and it’s the first time that Clark collaborated with the Boys and Girls Club of Worcester. In the past, Clark worked with high school students from the University Park Campus School Institute for Student Success, a small, strongly academic public school in Worcester that is partnered with Clark University and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The collaboration was more contained in the past; UPCS students simply walked down the block to Clark and worked in a very controlled environment. This year was quite the opposite ~ Clark students took the initiative, walking down to the Boys and Girls Club. In this way, they caught the youth in their element, in a place where they felt comfortable to express themselves. “By going to see them on their home turf, it wasn’t like we were trying to force Clark on them,” said John Dutton. “Also, it was great to work with the kids at the Boys and Girls Club, as opposed to the University Park Campus School, because most of them don’t have the same opportunities that the UPCS students have.”

The exhibition on December 14 included free food catered by OneLove Café, a popular Jamaican restaurant on Main Street in Worcester, and live entertainment ~ there was a jazz trio comprised of talented Clark students and accompanied by two eleven-year-old girls from the Boys and Girls Club who performed a choreographed hip-hop dance. The exhibition was extremely successful, bringing in Clark students and faculty, Boys and Girls Club members and their parents, and locals. In the wake of the exhibit, the project will live on through MainSouthSpeaks.com, where Clark students and Main South residents alike are urged to speak for themselves, and realize that they really aren’t all that different from each other.

Photos: (top) Photo from exhibit, taken by Rachel-Bryson-Brockmann

(lower) Photo from exhibit taken by Mike Harris, a student at Clark University