Direct From Kenya, Diary Project returns to E. 10th

By Deena Skolnick

"It just sort of happened spontaneously...I thought, "What a great idea to bring kids art and share it." Mark Scheflen, the artistic director of the Visual Arts Program at Saint Mark's and the founder and organizer of the Diary Project, is reminiscing about the beginnings of the Diary Project. This continuing series of international exhibitions of children's art started as local workshops in the Parish Hall of St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, at E. 10th St. at 2nd Ave. Out of these workshops came Scheflen's idea to share art between children of different cultures. So Scheflen started the Machakos and Makueni Project in 1995. This project began with photography and art workshops at school districts of Machakos and Makueni in Kenya, where Kenyan children produced artwork over a six-week period. Scheflen organized these works for a series of exhibitions in New York State, where American children responded to the Kenyan work and added their own artistic pieces to the project. The exhibition grew and has since traversed the Atlantic twice, graced the halls of the United Nations? headquarters and the National Children's Castle in Tokyo, Japan, and recently won funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to be a model program for bringing arts into the schools. This fall, the Diary Project will travel to South Africa to continue the artistic dialogue. Now, the Diary Project is coming back to the place of it's conception. The gallery at St. Mark's in-the-Bowery will be open from July 30 through September 2, with viewing times on Friday and Sundays from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. and by appointment. This exhibition includes work from children at area schools including the Lower East Side Community High School and the Manhattan Career Development School.Children at elementary schools, high schools and schools for the deaf in the United States and Kenya participated in art and photography workshops before creating their own works to be displayed as part of the project. These works include photo diaries, creative writings, paintings, drawings and collages that combine text and image to communicate the experience of being deaf. Scheflen said the project began to focus more on deaf children after he ran a workshop with the New York School for the Deaf. "I found [the deaf children] extraordinarily visual," said Scheflen. "They really understand and relate to the visual world. I was fascinated with that, since I'm a visual person myself." Although many of the works express the young artists' own experiences and aesthetic, there are marked contrasts between the Kenyan and the American pieces. Kenyans were concerned with sexual and labor exploitations, tribal warfare, environmental destruction, poverty, teenage pregnancy and death, while Americans were more focused on issues of individual and social interaction. In the future, Scheflen plans to continue this project and see what direction it will take. "Other things will develop as I go along," he said. "I'll take the South African art to Kenya, then back here, then I'll take it another way...It's one of the mysteries of doing things like this. I would love to take it maybe to Asia somewhere. It would be interesting to exchange between the U.S.A. and Asia and Africa." For Scheflen it's just a natural extension of one great idea.