Something From Nothing

During August, artwork created by clients from Sojourner’s Adolescent Residential program will be on display in the Student Gallery of the Fitton Center. The clients received art lessons from the Arts in Common Program, which brings the arts to people who might otherwise not be able to participate. Artist Amy Edwards has been working with the Sojourner adolescent clients weekly with painting, drawing, origami and other projects.

A reception for the exhibition will be 5 to 7 p.m. Aug. 3. The Fitton Center is located at 101 S. Monument Ave. in Hamilton.

For Tabatha, who is in the seventh week of her second round of residential treatment at Sojourner, the art has been a way to express her thoughts through painting and drawing. She hopes it will keep her from having to come back to Sojourner again. Her first stay, when she was 13, lasted 18 weeks, she said.

“I sort of fell off the track and my grades plummeted down,” she said. “I started to re-use and I wrote a poem about one of my uses that a friend found and got frightened. She told the school and the school sent me here.”

The poem talked about the pills she had been using and ended with, “That’s the only thing I want to feel/It is the only good wonderful happiest feeling I have.”

But now she has another happiness in art.

“It’s a way I can express how I feel because I have a problem with talking,” she said. “It’s a way to express myself in a better way.”

Sojourner, a Butler County agency that provides chemical dependency treatment for families and individuals, operates six different programs in the area.

The Sojourner Residential Treatment home can house up to 16 adolescents. Many of them are sent their through the juvenile court system, but they also get referrals from area schools and Butler County Children Services.

Their holistic approach treats the whole person and the whole family through each stage of the recovery process.

Betty Huff, director of the residential treatment program and known to the dozen teenagers now staying there as “Grandma Betty,” said that her clients aren’t the bad kids people sometimes think they are.

“They’re just good kids who have made bad choices,” she said. “One of the reasons for doing the art show is to open up the world to them. Even though the Fitton Center is right here in Hamilton, they don’t experience that part of the world.”

Huff said she’s always on the lookout for volunteers who can come and share their hobbies or interests with her clients. In addition to art classes, they’ve learned landscaping and gardening, Spanish, dancing and other hobbies.

“We can help them get clean and sober. But if we don’t give them alternatives to drinking and drugs, then we’re not doing our job,” Huff said.

“Otherwise, when they get out of here, they go back to the same neighborhood and do the same things. We hope that they can learn to express themselves in a new way, and making art is new to a lot of the kids.

“They need to see that you can have fun not using drugs because a lot of them don’t believe that.”

Huff said that she visited the Fitton Center last year to discuss bringing art into the lives of her clients after two children touched her heart. She still can’t tell the story without tears welling up in her eyes.

“One of them was borderline mentally retarded and the other had a deceased mother,” she said.

The first one loved to draw pictures of cars, “low-riders,” even though he could barely read, and would constantly be showing them to Grandma Betty.

The second one was in class one day and was showing a classmate a poem he had written. The teacher tried to smooth over the disruption by saying, “Well, maybe you should read it in front of the class,” Huff said. “And so he did.

“It was heart-wrenching, about changing his life so he didn’t end up dead like his mother from a drug overdose.

“Everyone was crying, even the teacher.”

Huff began to look into options that would give her charges a creative outlet and a boost in their world view, so she went to the Fitton Center and had a meeting with Cathy Mayhugh, the director of exhibitions.

“I had her crying, too,” Huff said.

The first exhibition, which came before the teenagers started taking the Arts in Common classes, was admittedly crude, Huff said.

“It was mostly stuff on poster board, but it was our kids’ work and it was great,” she said. The artists got all dressed up for the event and even performed a rap that they had written.

“It was such a joy to see them go in there, see their artwork on the walls and to see the look on their faces,” Huff said. “That’s why I keep doing this: To see the looks on their faces.”

This year, the artists have had access to good art supplies and instruction from teachers from the Fitton Center’s Arts in Common program.

“For some of them, this is the most positive thing they’ve ever done,” said Brent Russel, Sojourner’s director of development.

“They just beam,” Huff said. “The parents come in her and you can see the pride in their faces, too.”

While some of the artists don’t always directly address the issues that got them to using drugs and alcohol, some tackle their problems head-on.

Julian, 16, spread out a life-size silhouette on the table. The figure painted in bright red is adorned with colorful swirls.

“It’s me,” he said, “just different colors. The red is about before I came in here. I had a lot of anger and rage about my past. All of the different colors represent a different mood.

“I call it ‘Mystery Man’ because people can never tell what kind of mood I’m going to be in.”

Making art, he said, “teaches you more about how you feel inside, and then you can look back and say, ‘That felt good to do that.’ When I was under the influence, I thought that was stupid. Now that I’m in here, it feels good to paint.”

He’s been counting the days of his stay at Sojourner, but is still looking forward to graduating in a few more weeks.

“I’m going to get a job, go back to school, and try to get my grades up as best I can,” he said.

He hopes that making art will be a way of helping him cope with the stress and with his changing moods.

“If I ever get in a depressed mood, I might just slap something together to see what I get out of it,” he said.

A version of this story originally appeared in the JournalNews, Hamilton, Ohio, July 31, 2006.