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By opening the doors of design studios to urban teens, the Worldstudio Foundation's mentoring program is changing lives.
By Jonathan Ringen
February 2002
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Mentor: Leanne Hitchcock
Mentee: Ellie Knecht
Visualizing Violence
For one of its first mentoring projects, the Worldstudio Foundation
paired three San Francisco kids with photographers (including Jim
Goldberg) to take pictures on a large- format (20" x 24")
Polaroid camera. Polaroid donated ten exposures and an hour of studio
time to each pair.
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Above left
Mentor: Tucker Viemiester/Razorfish
Mentee: Keshawn Seeley
Above right
Mentor: Janeil Engelstad
Mentee: Taneisha Butler
Visualizing Violence
The Visualizing Violence project paired 12 kids aged 15-20 from New York
and Los Angeles with working designers and artists to create billboards
and bus shelter posters dealing with the impact guns have had on their
communities. The work was mounted throughout Los Angeles and installed
along the route of the Million Mom March, in Washington, D.C.
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Mentor: Rachel Ericson, Sesame Workshop
Mentee: Jessica Fei
Create! Don't Hate. Campaign for Tolerance
Fifteen-year-old Fei's project answers the rhetorical question,
"What are you made of?" with a chart of personality traits
based on the Periodic Table of the Elements. She also designed custom
T-shirts based on the table; the wearer picks three of the elements (for
example: Ow, Mh, Vg--Sensitive Metalhead Vegetarian) to appear on the
front.
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Students from Manhattan's East Side Community High School's Anti-Bias Squad
participating in a discussion about their organization's logo (above).
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Mentor: Barnaby Mendez, Artist And Teacher
Mentee: Heladio Santiago
Visualizing Violence
Six of the kids that participated in Visualizing Violence designed bus shelter
posters like those on the previous page. The other six created billboards,
such as 17-year-old Santiago's, above.
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Mentor: Mach Arom/Ogilvy Interactive
Mentee: Lina Wu
Create! Don't Hate. Campaign for Tolerance
"Lina did not have a lot of tangible background in terms of
creating ads," mentor Arom says. "She was very raw." But
during the six months they worked together Wu picked up fundamental
layout, typography, and Adobe Illustrator skills.
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Mentors: Krista Mcglohan/Ogilvy One, David Hartman/Ogilvy Interactive, Myron
Polenberg, Elise Maiberger, Michele Washington, Robert Shapiro, Guerilla
Girls (Aphra Behn, Coco Chanel, Anna May Wong), Mark Russell
Mentee: The Anti-Bias Squad, East Side Community High School
Establishing the Anti-Bias Squad
This high school group played the role of art director while working with
a team of mentors from a variety of disciplines to come up with a logo,
posters, T-shirts, slogans, and Web content. Last month the posters (two
of which are reproduced here) were wheat-pasted around New York as part
of Creative Time's "Artists Respond to 9/11" project.
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Mentors: Scott Stowell/Open (Center), Chip Wass/Wassco (Standing)
Mentee: Peter Bernard Killeen
Dispel the Prejudice!
"I got to see different facets of design, because Chip is an illustrator
and Scott is more graphic design," Killeen says about his experience
working on an advertising parody about stereotypes in the gay community.
Stowell says, "He had lots of ideas about the way people are portrayed
and stereotyped in advertising."
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When Lina Wu--a vivacious 18-year-old with scant design experience--took
the subway uptown from her family's Chinatown apartment to the Manhattan
offices of Ogilvy & Mather last March, she didn't know anything
about the world of advertising. "I thought it was a small company,"
she says, laughing. "When I got there it was this huge building, and
I was thinking, 'Oh, my goodness--I just graduated from high school.'"
For the next six months Wu continued to visit the ad agency, meeting every
week or so with Ogilvy Interactive creative director Mach Arom to work on
a public-service advertisement poster on racial tolerance. The two were
brought together by the Worldstudio Foundation, an eight-year-old New York--based
nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging designers and artists
in social activism. A significant component of this mission is a mentoring
program that provides "at-risk" teenagers the opportunity to learn
from established designers. "A lot of kids don't really know that the
creative professions are viable careers," says Mark Randall, who founded
Worldstudio with David Sterling. "So we started this mentorship program
where we pair kids with working creative professionals to get them into
studios to work on projects one-on-one." By opening office doors
to the teens, Worldstudio is also providing them with an instant and powerful
set of connections in the design world.
Over the course of the program--which takes place for a minimum of six weeks--mentor
and student collaborate on a design that then joins the work of the other
kids as part of a larger project. Beginning in 1998 Visualizing Violence
involved teens in New York and Los Angeles who worked with mentors such
as Tucker Viemeister and artist Janeil Engelstad (who conceived the project)
to design billboards and bus shelter posters about the effects of gun violence
on young peoples' lives. The work was mounted throughout L.A., and the posters
later traveled to Washington, D.C., where they were installed on the Mall
along the route of the Million Mom March.
The current national Create! Don't Hate. Campaign for Tolerance is larger
in scale, more multifaceted, and includes mentors from big firms including
Smart Design, @radical.media, and 212 Associates. In addition to posters
like Wu's, the campaign also includes the journal Dispel the Prejudice,
which contains designs by gay teens that will be distributed nationally
in public schools and community centers. And in a departure from the one-on-one
mentorship model, the Anti-Bias Squad--a student group at Manhattan's East
Side Community High School--is working to create a logo, T-shirts, slogans,
and Web content with an all-star panel of advisers that includes people
from Ogilvy; activist artists the Guerrilla Girls; and Myron Polenberg,
the former Saatchi & Saatchi art director who came up with the army's
"Be All You Can Be" campaign.
A central element of the program is the kids' exposure to what might otherwise
be a closed world. In 2000 industrial designer Viemeister worked with Keshawn
Seeley, a Harlem teenager who had recently been released from a correctional
facility, to design a powerful bus shelter poster about crime for Visualizing
Violence. "I would say that at the minimum they get to see that there
are all these people committed to--and concerned with--how things look and
how they work," Viemeister says. "We were doing this project at
Razorfish, and there were rooms full of young people working on computers
and making the kind of stuff Keshawn had seen on MTV--and he was like, 'Wow.'"
Wu is now a furiously industrious first-year student in the advertising
program at the Fashion Institute of Technology, still living with her parents
in Chinatown. (Getting her to take time out of her schedule for an interview
was a real challenge--it eventually happened at 9:00 at night.) She emigrated
from China to New York in 1990, when she was seven. Although she won a trophy
for her work in an advanced art class in junior high, she succumbed to pressure
from her father and enrolled in a business high school to study accounting.
"When I went there I totally kicked art out of my mind," she says.
"There are no art classes there." But in her senior year Wu realized
that she regretted giving up art and began to visit the Door, an after-school
center in Soho that offers many art classes--where she learned about the
mentorship program.
At Ogilvy Wu was free to sit at a desk outside Arom's office and fine-tune
her project while learning Adobe Illustrator ("I spent a lot of hours
in front of the computer," she says), knowing that if she got stuck
she could ask someone for help. This access to technology is another important
benefit of the program, because many of its participants don't have
computers at home. "Lina went in not really knowing how to use a computer
and came out with five different posters on tolerance, knowing all
of these different software applications," says Worldstudio's Adria
Pecora, who manages the mentoring program. "Because the meetings are
held at the office, the student is able to gain hands-on experience
and get exposure not only to what the mentor does for a living, but the
mentor's colleagues as well."
In addition to teaching Wu practical skills, the mentorship served as a
crash course in design aesthetics. "I learned to see a lot of different
things: how to look at art, how to look at advertising--which ads are good,
which are not," she says. Arom adds, "At one point she thought
that more color is better. She was using a bunch of funky backgrounds, but
came to realize that for the sake of impact less is more."
Peter Bernard Killeen, whose advertising parody about stereotypes in the
gay community is a particularly self-assured project, also learned this
lesson. "A basic design principle that really influenced me is
that sometimes it's better to just be simple to get the point across,"
he says. Designer Scott Stowell (formerly of M&Co), who mentored Killeen
along with illustrator Chip Wass, says, "You don't have to dress your
idea up or disguise it. That realization is something that takes a long
time to figure out--and maybe some people never do."
For Wu, the experience of working with Arom went a long way toward quelling
parental concerns about her new career path. "They were hesitant when
she decided she wanted to go into the art and design side of things,"
Arom says. "To many Asian-American parents this idea of being an artist
or an art director is very foreign and scary. But I think Lina's been able
to prove that what she wants to do is valid. I have great hopes for her."
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