Lloyd Kleine Harvey working with art students.

Twenty fourth-graders tumble into an airy St. Louis library meeting room. “Come on, Julie!” one girl yells, as kids race each other to tables laden with magic markers and construction paper. It’s a sudden burst of energy, counterbalanced by the grandfather figure standing in a corner. A sign labeled “The Peace Project, a celebration of peace and cultural diversity” hints at the day’s topic. Lloyd Kleine Harvey, a 70-year-old artist who’s spent the past ten years working with children and the arts, is about to introduce a new set of kids to his brand of peaceful creativity.

“Do any of you meditate?” he asks the group of ten-year-olds. Shoulders shrug, eyebrows raise, and Harvey continues, “We’re going to get very still, allow ourselves to get quiet.” The room is silent but vibrates with the looks of expectant, if slightly bewildered, children.

“Are we too young to talk about peace?” Harvey interrupts the silence. Now the kids know what they’re supposed to do. “No!” choruses around the room.

“What does peace mean?” Harvey asks. A slight, towheaded boy says, “No war.” And so Harvey’s workshop on peace and art begins.

A Response to School Violence
Harvey began The Peace Project two years ago following a series of school violence incidents. “When Columbine came about, it was like I had been stung,” he says. “I remember asking, ‘What can I do?’ Even working here in the St. Louis schools, I see so much violence. Children have so little respect for themselves, so they have little respect for each other.”

That’s why Harvey’s workshops focus on helping children tap into something he says everyone is born with: an inner sense of creativity. Even if every child isn’t perfect in reading or math, being creative isn’t about being perfect. “Children don’t learn much about creativity in school,” says Harvey. “One little girl once told me, ‘Mr. Harvey, I have it, but I don’t use it.’ My role is to help them bring that out, to help them feel more empowered to do whatever they want, to hold their head up and feel better about a test that’s coming up.”

Harvey holds a colorful 15-feet long quilt in front of the fourth-graders. Doves, angels and olive branches splash across panels created by youngsters at another St. Louis area school. Oohs and aahs echo through the room, and someone pipes up, “We’re going to make something like that?!”

Picturing Peace
Yes, they are. Harvey tells them it’s okay to “think ethnic” in creating their artwork, and he encourages the kids to write in their native languages—several come from Vietnamese families. He passes out the cloth quilt panels that will be stitched together later, and then twenty fourth-graders dive into boxes filled with markers.

Graham traces his two fingers, making a yellow peace sign. “This tells people to stop fighting and get along better,” he says. “We need to tell that to everyone who wants war.”

David writes “Paz”—Spanish for “Peace”—above the Red Sea. “It’s the reflection of peace,” he explains. “The clouds mean it’s going to rain. It makes us healthy.”

Justin draws a rainbow underneath a peace sign. “It means to stop the fighting,” he says, “stop the war.”

The students’ teacher, Gen Moses, says the work the kids do with Harvey reinforces what they learn through a curriculum called Peace Works. “This workshop reinforces our curriculum on communicating well and resolving conflict well,” says Moses. “It can also reinforce the ‘hidden curriculum’—how we learn to share, how we learn to make friends.”

How Creativity Helps Kids Cope
That’s corroborated by research, such as an 11-year-long study of at-risk youth involved in arts, athletics and community service organizations through the nineties. “Research shows that even young people out of the most violent neighborhoods who take part in theatre or extensive visual arts or even music are more able to deal with conflict in their own lives, for example, dealing with abusive parents,” says the study’s author, Shirley Brice Heath, a language and early human development researcher at Stanford University.

Heath ascribes young artists’ abilities to work through issues of conflict to the art world’s focus on completion and resolution. “Art forces one to work to reconcile, bring things together,” she says. In Heath’s study, arts organization students talked about how their art allowed them to express their pent-up feelings, as well as step back and observe what was going on in their lives from a distance.

Another recent study by researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University assigned 2000 elementary and middle school students pupils to “high-arts” and “low-arts” groups based on whether they fell into the upper-most or lowest quartiles in the amount of art instruction received. A “high-arts” fifth-grader might receive three continuous years of art and music instruction, while a “low-arts” student might get less than a year. The study found that “high-arts” students outperformed “low-arts” students on measures such as originality (quality of responses), elaboration (imagination and exposition of detail), and resistance to closure (being open to possibilities necessary to make mental leaps). High-arts students also demonstrated strong abilities to express ideas and take risks in learning.

The Arts Education Partnership sums up the results of its 1997 study of school districts that value arts education by observing that the arts turn schools into communities, allowing students and faculty to “work together, create things together, and display the results of their efforts together.” Community-oriented environments may help children feel more comfortable taking risks, such as using art to communicate about peace and war.

“One of the reasons we advocate art in schools is because art provides a way to communicate,” says Tom Hatfield, executive director of the National Art Education Association. “We communicate visually in a lot of different ways, that’s what makes art and music different. You learn skills that you don’t learn anywhere else. As you go through exercises that enable students to make marks on a surface [such as on the quilts], it helps them give shape and meaning to a concept such as peace.”

Moses agrees. “Introducing these bigger social topics like hunger, war, the AIDS epidemic, but in an artistic way, gives the children an opportunity to respond to all that information artistically,” says Moses. “Because some kids can’t sit there and respond with an essay, maybe they don’t read or write very well, but they draw. They can respond in a manner they’re comfortable with.”

Giving Back
The Peace Project is a program of Art from Recycled Materials, a nonprofit Harvey began after he moved back to his hometown of St. Louis six years ago. Art from Recycled Materials techniques, like using old fabric, used buttons, ropes, ribbon, and yarn, carry over into the creation of Peace Project quilts. When it seems to fit the mood of students at a particular workshop, Harvey might highlight the use of recycled materials and how students can show respect for the environment. But his main Peace Project focus seems to come from a desire to give back to the area that raised him, particularly the underserved inner-city and African-American communities of St. Louis.

Harvey believes that by opening children up to their own creativity, educators can help open them up to new ideas and to each other. “We’re in the same space sharing the same experience, we may have the same anxieties,” Harvey says of his workshops. At the end of this particular fourth-grade workshop, when Harvey asks whether drawing peace was hard, one little boy quickly says yes. Harvey—who struggled with his own fears of the creative process as a New York artist—believes the child speaks for his classmates, too, letting them know they’re all experiencing similar feelings. “It makes them much more open,” he explains. “I think it may open the little Vietnamese to the black girl across the table. Maybe they won’t call the kid with the glasses ‘Four Eyes’.”

Harvey takes his Peace Project workshops to St. Louis schools, detention centers, libraries—anywhere there’s an attentive group of kids. The Regional Arts Commission and St. Louis/Jefferson Solid Waste Management fund the program. Currently, however, Harvey seeks funds to take The Peace Project to Uzbekistan. The Museum of Peace and Solidarity in Samarkand has invited Harvey to exhibit the peace quilts, or tapestries as he calls them, this spring. Hopefully, Uzbeks will view a colorful tapestry created by English-, Vietnamese- and Spanish-speaking American fourth-graders and read the universal language of peace.

Resources:

• The National Art Education Association offers educators several models for incorporating arts into their curricula.
• Visit Connect for Kids’ Art topic pages.

Talk Back

If you've got comments or questions about this story, we'd like to hear them. Send your response to Susan Phillips.

---

Loriee Evans is a writer living in St. Louis, Missouri.