By LILLIAN GLAROS
On July 9th, during a rainy evening at the Hyattsville Branch Library, over twenty young people between 16 and 24 years old gathered for a new art program run by the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.
Even when the lights turned off due to a storm, the young adults continued sketching their still lives as part of the Therapy Through Art for Teens and Young Adults program, led by Jesse Raudales, an Olympic artist for the 2006 Winter Olympics, who was also the first Latino Olympic Artist from the United States.
The program lasts from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. On that stormy Wednesday evening, the students started with a lesson on what happens when one views and creates art, as well as how art can serve as therapy. The lesson, presented by Michele Morrissey — a corporate speech-language pathologist and CEO of Lucidity, a communications consulting firm — also involved asking students how they felt on an emotional intensity scale.
According to Morrissey, therapy through art involves using the creation of art to express oneself and work through emotions.
Students were then led by Raudales in a still life exercise in which they sketched fruit, ivy and flowers. Other classes focus on line drawing, shading, watercolors, acrylics and more.
The free program started on July 2, according to Heather Jackson, the library system’s area director for the west branches. The system had already been doing work with what Jackson called “emerging adults,” or people aged 16 to 24. The program consists of eight sessions, Jackson said.
Inspired by an “Adulting 101” class in which participants asked for more artistic expression opportunities, the library system asked Raudales to come up with an opportunity for the “emerging adults” that employed both self care and artistic expression, Jackson said. The program is funded by a grant from the Urban Libraries Council, according to Jackson.
“What we’re trying to do here … is give our emerging adults both an outlet for creative expression, along with some technical skills for doing that, but also make sure that their artistic expression is [in] a way that they can process their emotions,” Jackson said. “It’s a stressful time to be in this world, especially as a young adult, and so just giving them an outlet for that is really important to us.
Having access to therapeutic art is important, Raudales said. It’s a way to express bottled up emotions, like anger or sadness, he added. Raudales’ art helped him deal with a difficult childhood, he said.
“Whenever I was painting or drawing or sketching, it just helped me … cope with everything better.”
Sofia Knaap, a 22-year-old Greenbelt resident and University of Maryland student, said that art provides her with a way to regulate her emotions.
“I feel like I’m someone who definitely tends to feel a lot all at once, so it can be really hard for me to decipher, ‘Okay, what emotion am I feeling?’” Knaap said. “Sometimes it takes me just taking a sec to sit down [and] draw it out, for me to come back to center and finally have that space to then go in and dissect my emotions and figure out what I was feeling in that moment.”
Knaap, who sketched a still-life of fruit in a vase, was attending the program series for the first time, she said. The studio art major said she thinks there should be more free, accessible programs, similar to the classes taught by Raudales, which teach young people how to move through the world.
The program will be hosting a public art exhibit when it concludes, according to the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System website.
A prior version of this story said the upper age limit for this program was 20, rather than the correct upper age limit of 24.