Hidden talent: One of Crisafio's most talented students would never let him take her photograph. "She kept doing all these evasive maneuvers every time I put a camera up," he says.
Francis Crisafio, an artist who cofounded the program FACES/The Children of Manchester Arts Collaborative in 2002, has spent the past six years documenting these young students, most poignantly in his portraits of them facing the camera head-on. The subjects stand squarely in front of a blank chalkboard while holding up, in front of their faces, a colorful, collaged self-portrait that they each created under the guidance of Crisafio and his teaching colleague Meda Rago.
“I’m always fascinated by the power of art to bring out unspoken issues and feelings, especially with children,” Crisafio says.
The art classes he co-teaches with Rago, in a part of town that he describes as “the dark hole of Pittsburgh,” are held twice a week, with 12 to 15 primary school students in each of the two classes. (Crisafio is developing another class with older students who will take pictures and develop a book project.) The program is funded by the state of Pennsylvania as well as local and regional organizations.
Self-portraiture is the main focus of his classes for younger students. The visual activity they engage in is fairly straightforward: Crisafio makes and then prints a life size headshot of each child; the child creates a hand-drawn contour line drawing from the picture; then each child constructs a collage of his or her face, with visual elements sourced from the pages of recycled magazines.
© Francis Crisafio
Media Masks: A student holds the collaged self-portrait he made from recycled magazines.
Crisafio notes on his Web site that when students confront the content so prevalent in popular magazines, identity, class and gender issues often rise to the surface and show up in their portraits.
“We get a lot of kids who pick up on what they perceive society says they should have, and they sort of plaster that all over their faces,” Crisafio says, pointing out one image of a boy who created a collage using magazine pictures of a Cadillac, a watch and diamond earrings. “At first I sort of resisted that because Meda and I were trying to go for something a little more like what we thought was purely artistic, which was a bias on our part. We don’t want to see these watches and these cars and footballs and all this stuff. And then I started to realize, that is what these kids are seeing. That’s how they’re perceiving themselves.”
Crisafio says he and Rago face many behavioral and emotional challenges when working with the children, but the biggest difficulty is simply getting them to look.
“There’s a lot of resistance at the beginning. ‘I’m ugly,’ ‘Can we do another picture?’ ‘I don’t like that drawing.’ Once you get past that and something gets to happen, I think that’s the magical part,” he explains.
Crisafio, also a musician, says his way of thinking about art was greatly influenced by John Miller Chernoff ‘s book African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms.
“In Africa, in a very indigenous way, expression is really a communal act,” Crisafio says. “There’s a reason people express themselves in terms of a community. It isn’t something we relegate to a museum or to an art fair or a gallery. It’s something that’s part of the daily fabric of their lives. I think that idea is certainly at play here with the children,” he sums up. “I’m engaged with the kids, Meda’s engaged with the kids, the kids are engaged with us, and we’re doing something that’s an outcome of all of us.”
