Stars in stones, messages in clay: Youth art and community shine at Carbondale Arts’ Youth Arts Showcase

For the past 10 months, teacher and artist Gabriela Mejia has dedicated multiple hours a week to encouraging the creativity of local youth in after school bilingual art classes through Carbondale Arts’ Stepping Stones Artist Residency. 

Now, the artistic expressions and explorations of program participants, ages 10 to 24, will be highlighted at the Youth Arts Showcase at the Carbondale Arts Gallery from May 23 to June 26. 

“The exhibition is a culmination of not only artistic works from the kids, but it’s also an emotional outlet to what Stepping Stones represents,” Mejia said. “Being at Stepping Stones, there’s been a lot that I’ve seen and observed as far as relationships with kids and how they deal with peer pressure and bullying and then also how the staff are with the kids.

“The staff are amazing. They are so supportive,” she added. “So a lot of the kids feel at Stepping Stones that it’s a safe haven for them to be themselves. There’s been opportunities for them to explore different ways of being.”

The exhibition will feature works from over 21 young artists involved in the Stepping Stones Artist Residency or  the Carbondale Arts Creative Apprentice Program, which gives teens ages 14 to 21 opportunities to work with creative professionals on local projects.

This year, youths in the apprentice program have been busy installing flags and planting flowers in the Latino Folk Art Garden, painting a mural in the Youth Art Park and installing signage about local wildlife. 

“The actual work in the show will be installations that showcase some of the processes and techniques and artifacts from the work that they’ve been doing,” said Michael Stout, Carbondale Arts community engagement director. 

“Part of the work is exploring ideas of artists working in the community and how that intersects with the environment, with social issues and with building community,” he later added. 

The exhibition is more than a showcase of young local artists — it’s also an opportunity for the community to experience artistic creation similar to the work they’ve been doing. 

Fence pickets mirroring the apprentice program mural project will be installed on the walls of the Carbondale Arts Gallery and exhibition visitors will be invited to draw on them with paint markers.

“Those fence planks will go back out into the field to repair some of the areas where the fence is broken,” Stout said. “So there’s this interplay between the work that they did outside, bringing that indoors, and having the gallery not just be a place to view that, but to interact with it and then taking that work back out into the field.”

The Stepping Stones portion of the exhibit will feature several piñatas, as well as solo work from the teen artists. 

Mejia and her students created four piñatas shaped like stones and filled them with clay figures, wooden animals and origami stars. Positive messages that the young artists want to share with the community are carefully written on the handcrafted pieces. 

Visitors who come to the exhibition’s opening reception on Friday, June 6, or closing on June 26 will have the opportunity to break a piñata and bring a little piece of positivity home with them.

“We’re celebrating community,” Mejia said. “We’re allowing people that have never even broken a piñata to put themselves into the realm of what it means to break open together.”