Fresh Artists creates youth ecosystem

Young artists take all kinds of grief, said Web designer and hit music remixer Davidson Ospina. "Teachers, family, and friends say, 'You'll never make a career out of this. Find something real to do with your life.' "

That's emphatically not the message that the nonprofit Fresh Artists team will be delivering this week with a three-day "Cool Jobs" career fair at the Sherman Mills complex in East Falls.

Backed by the Knight Foundation and local arts retailer A.C. Moore, the pop-up event (Tuesday through Thursday) is introducing almost 600 at-risk seventh graders to successful makers and doers - mural painter to architect, electronic game designer to sports photographer, LED light sculptor to chef.

"These are jobs that can earn you a good living, that aren't about the 9-to-5 grind, that make you happy to get up every day," said Kevin Lyons, an illustrator whose designs crop up on Nike and Adidas sneakers, backpacks, and skateboards. "And if you're someone who loves the arts but aren't that good at doing them, there are hundreds of ancillary jobs that can keep you in the game."

"We originally thought about presenting 'Cool Jobs' for 10th graders," said Fresh Artists founder and CEO Barbara Chandler Allen in a pre-fair get-together with fellow participants, as workers were assembling the graphically stylish (of course) trade-show-styled booths (contributed by Visual Magnetics) where the middle schoolers will meet their mentors.

"But then someone high up in the Philadelphia public school system told me, 'Tenth grade is far too late,' " Allen added. "That more than half the kids in low-income, low-resources inner-city schools are at risk of dropping out after eighth grade. Infuriating! So you have to get to them, inspire them, before that. And honestly, if the kids do want to pursue an arts education and career in high school and college, they need to start building their portfolio now."

Fresh Artists is itself a model of how the arts can flourish and work around the elimination of arts funding in public schools, which sends a terrible message to budding talents. Key STEM (science, technology, engineering, math)-minded educators now realize they need STEAM, adding art to keep creative juices flowing.

What's the Fresh Artists strategy? Build an ecosystem of young artist-contributors along with publisher-distributors and fiscal supporters, grassroots to corporate, that rejuvenates itself.

"On the books, we're a small, nonprofit arts education organization that's been gradually building out a national footprint from Philadelphia over the last eight years. But really, our core function is social entrepreneurship," said Allen, who has a long history in collection management at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and Cleveland Museum of Art.

Fresh Artists reaches out to art teachers and students, asking them to license a digital copy of their art to be included in its collection, now numbering more than 1,200 works.

Fresh Artists' small staff, which includes Allen's son Roger, then blows up the best images to massive poster size - think six by nine feet - on high-resolution, large-format HP and flatbed Mutoh printers (contributed, of course).

In return for a sizable donation, this "full service turnkey corporate art program" then decorates the walls of major facilities, like local headquarters for Independence Blue Cross, SAP Americas, Comcast, and the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, with reproductions of the students' brightly colored work. The students keep their original art - and their copyrights.

The art also is used for other income generators - like the "A is for Art Museum" Memory Game on sale at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and DENY Designs' brightly patterned bedding and shower curtains designed by disabled students at the HMS School for Children With Cerebral Palsy.

A recent install for a "smaller" 12,000-square-foot office garnered an $8,000 donation for the cause. And, coming full circle, that money then buys art supplies and education kits for poverty-zone schools, "where otherwise the teachers would have to beg for materials from the community or pay for it themselves," Allen said. Sakura, maker of Cray-Pas pastels and Behr paint, also throws a lot of goodies into the kits.

The young artists contributing to the collection enjoy both the thrill of seeing their work displayed in grand fashion and a new sensation as philanthropists, giving back to the cause. "The concept is so novel, we had to come up with a new term to describe it - 'lateral philanthropy,' " Allen said. "It's a paradigm shift that empowers children to be the catalytic donors."

Cool Jobs is strictly for invited students and art teachers. But grown-ups can meet and greet the team at a Sneak Peak gala Tuesday from 6 to 9 p.m. at Moulin at Sherman Mills, 3502 Scotts Lane. Admission is $95 (and up, if you're feeling more generous). Details at https://freshartists.org/programs/cool-jobs or 267-331-8614.

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