Anaijiah Knox, 10, tried to quiet her doubts as she stepped on the plane to London on June 3.
“I was nervous about meeting the other kids,” said Knox, who lives in the Renaissance Place at Grand neighborhood. “What if I don’t fit in?”
Knox and her friend Laiyla Johnson, 11, are members of Room13Delmar, an afterschool art studio at the Renaissance Place at Grand’s community building in North City. For the two years that Knox has attended the studio’s Monday gatherings, she’s heard about Room13Harclive in Bristol, England – where the studio’s founder Ilene Berman first got the inspiration.
While St. Louis-based sculptor Berman and her family were living in Bristol for one year, she volunteered at the student-run Room13Harclive art studio, which is inside Harclive Primary School and funded through grants and donations. This year, Berman decided that these two worlds needed to connect, and she raised funds for Knox and Johnson to make the eight-day trip.
Both Knox and Johnson are the first ones in their immediate families to leave the country. Once Knox arrived at the Bristol studio, she said, she felt like she was home.
“It was so amazing,” Johnson said of the Bristol studio. “You can create whatever you want, and so many kids come and go.”
Everywhere you look, you see art projects in progress, she said. The students initiate what they want to work on, not the adults. Students also run a store to raise money for the studio’s supplies.
The big difference between the two studios is that Bristol has a designated room in an elementary school, said Erika N. Wilson, coordinator of the Renaissance Place community building, who also went on the trip. There, the students do nothing but art projects, and they can access it daily during the school day. At Renaissance Place, the pop-up studio is only open every Monday.
Wilson was impressed with the fact that the Bristol studio is fully student-run. The older students serve as the board of directors, and the younger students have management roles as well. In fact, when they introduced themselves, Wilson said, they would also state their titles.
“They have meetings and positions,” she said. “It helps move the mission forward. It means a lot to them.”
Knox noticed that the art projects are different. Bristol does more portraits, while the Delmar studio does more spray painting.
“They’d never done spray painting,” she said.
Knox said one student’s story really stuck with her. The girl’s mother is dying from an incurable illness, she said, and the art studio helps to keep her mind off that reality. One of the students in the St. Louis studio had a similar experience. Her friend, Victoria, lost her mother, and the studio helped her through that hard time.
“It makes her feel better,” she said. “She always tells us that she wants us to treat our parents good because you never know when you’re going to lose them.”
The two studios will now begin an art-making collaboration, Berman said, which will be installed in exhibition spaces in London and in St. Louis early 2017.
“It was important for the artists to meet each other so that the collaboration would be real to them,” she said.
The trip was sponsored by Urban Strategies, which helps facilitate programs at the girls’ community building, McCormack Baron Salazar, which built the 512-apartment Renaissance Place development, Saint Louis University and the Regional Arts Commission.
Room 13 International is an arts project with worldwide outposts that first started at a Scottish grammar school that had canceled its art classes. The children raised money to hire an artist to teach them, and the school let them use Room 13.
Room13Delmar goes beyond just Renaissance Place. Berman also has a mobile studio on a vending tricycle – which she first saw in Bristol – that she takes to neighborhoods north of Delmar.
She said it’s like “a ‘Mary Poppins’ bag that unfolds to create a space for creativity on the sidewalk,” as well as at the Senior Living Apartments of Renaissance Place, Renaissance at Grand Community Building and John Cochran Veterans Administration Medical Center.
Johnson said Room13 has created an environment of kids who “stick up for each other” and support each other.
“There are so many kids who are alone, and Room13 can bring kids together,” Johnson said. “There are so many kids who don’t have the opportunity that we are having. Room13 can help bring kids together by being creative.”
Follow this reporter on Twitter @rebeccarivas.
