D4RT is a mobile workshop that brought art education and a public art project to the struggling community of Yantaló. Yantaló is a village in the Peruvian Amazon jungle with a population of less than 3,000. Seemingly untouched by the modern world, the community survives in an destitute state. Thanks to the Yantaló Peru Foundation, improvements are being made in health and education, but hot water and electricity are still scarce and, for now, there is just one small, government-run school in Yantaló. There isn’t a single art program available.
Coordinating with Luis Vasquez, the President of the Yantaló Peru Foundation, I launched a Kickstarter project called D4RT:
I raised over $8,000. A few weeks later I was in Lima, explaining to customs agents why they shouldn’t tax my cargo of twenty Reeves Giant Art Sets, twenty aprons, twenty color wheels, twenty huge paper pads, comics and other books on everything from art history to space for kids.
In the end, sixty bucks seemed to do the trick – thankfully, the mural paints were bought for me in Peru by my Yantaló Foundation friends, and safely awaiting my arrival there!
Aspiring volunteers, take note: bringing two hundred pounds of art supplies into a country with rigid customs and bribe-hungry officials is not as fun as it sounds. Before we even left American soil, I paid an exorbitant sum in American Airlines luggage tolls in addition to the mystery fees Lima customs charged us upon arrival. Still, this was less heinous than what would have transpired had I tried shipping everything ahead of time. Namely, dubious safety of the goods, taxes, taxes, taxes and steep storage fees, to boot. In the end, after a series of comical, Kafkaesque events, my donations and I made it to Moyobamba unscathed and the fun began.
Coming to rural Peru was a transformative experience in itself – being immersed in Nature with a capital “N” had been a dream for this life-long city dweller. Waking up to the Amazon jungle on my doorstep, the din of cicadas swelling all around and mystery insects setting up camp in my half-unpacked suitcase served as daily conduit to the Nature we forget – supreme nature that, here, can swallow us whole. Despite such temptation, I couldn’t allow this trip to become a week-and-a-half-long vision quest – after all, I had a class to teach and a mural to paint. Calls of the wild had to be placed on hold until another time.
D4RT in Yantaló consisted of three two-hour workshops and three days dedicated to creating our mural. As I’m told is the local custom, not everything went according to plan – the school closed unexpectedly and an elaborate ballet of key acquisition was performed daily, so that my students and I could use the campus. And have you ever heard of “Peru time”? It’s real and at least thirty minutes slower than American time, which took some getting used to. Minor inconveniences aside, though, the kids, ages 7-13, took to my lesson plans (which I was lucky to have translated into Spanish and printed in advance) with enthusiasm and diligence.
I crafted a fantasy-based lesson plan which allowed total creative freedom, while instilling basic principles of representation. Our first lesson focused on self portraits. To my surprise, none of the twenty kids in my class had ever drawn one and my request of them depicting how they feel, rather than how they look, was a welcome challenge. Several students even asked for second sheets of paper, stayed after class and created two drawings. Memorably, one girl drew herself as a bleeding she-Jesus on the cross, followed by a drawing of herself as a happy flower.
On our second day together, we explored comic books – I brought All-star Superman, Mafalda, Calvin and Hobbes, Marvel’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The first half of the class was spent reading and after, the kids learned how to tell four-panel picture stories. Among my favorites: a man saved from drowning by a bear, a dog punished for eating a guinea pig, a seed growing into a tree and bearing fruit, then dying.
The final workshop was all about masks and painting. We passed around mask books and I asked the students to think about what they wanted their mask to represent, then to spend the rest of our day creating it with acrylic paint. While in Peru, I photographed as much as I could, as evidenced by the gallery below. You’ll notice a hazy effect in the Mask Day photos, which were taken with a bent and shattered filter stuck to my lens – an unfortunate side effect of being crammed into a taxi with eight other people one night.
Our remaining time was spent working on a special final assignment: a mural celebrating the imagination. It took me one day to prepare the wall, another to sketch out the design, and then, through another series of circumstances beyond my control, I found myself with just one day to paint the thing, start to finish. I was flying out the next day and thus in for a serious art marathon, arriving at the school at 6:30am and beginning the outline just as the chickens began to stir.
By 2pm, I had five extra pairs of hands helping* – even the school guard joined in. Friends and neighbors brought by sustenance as we sweated our way through a humid jungle afternoon and into the evening hours. As the sun set over the forest at 7pm, the mural was as done as it was going to get. We toasted and dispersed, high on fumes and the sense of accomplishment.
A note of thanks: D4RT couldn’t have happened without the help and translation skills of Milagros – a kindergarten English teacher who works with the Yantalo Peru Foundation.
