On a windy Tuesday evening, Blackstone Boulevard in Providence is filled with runners, dog walkers, and, in an unusual twist, artists.
Caroline Gordon is sitting underneath a tree with watercolors at her side. Most passing by would see an ordinary brown tree. Caroline says she sees much more.
“I really like the bark on the tree. It’s really cool. Most people would think it’s gray or brown, but if you look closely, there’s actually a bunch of different colors. You can see green and blue, some reds too.”
After using watercolors, Gordon quickly switches between markers to get the right blend of colors. In about 15 minutes, her drawing has a texture that’s very similar to the bark on the tree in front of her.
Susan Bailey noticed a lone pine cone nestled on the ground. She’s using charcoal to capture all of its tiny details.
“It’s challenging because it’s got a lot of little details and it’s all the same, and I have to just keep doing the same image over and over and over again, all over the outside of the cone.”
Gordon and Bailey are in the same after-school art class at School One in Providence. But, at 16 and 79 years old respectively, they are separated by 6 decades. It’s part of the design of the school’s intergenerational art class.
“I do think that in our current culture, we don’t mix generations very well and boy can we learn from each other,” says Michaela O’Donnell, the Director of Admissions at School One.
“I think it’s pretty lovely for a high schooler to see that at any point in life there’s going to be something you don’t know how to do that’s going to feel uncomfortable, but we do it, and doing it is important.”
Maureen Reddy’s two children both attended School One. Now, at 70, she finds herself enrolled in this 3-hour-long class that meets every Tuesday.
“I’ve always been interested in cross-generational relationships, and I think our society tends to be age segregated, which is unfortunate. So I like the idea of taking classes together. I like the idea of mixing age groups a lot.”
When the class returns inside, Reddy takes a break from her work to see what her classmates are working on.
“Oh my god, look at Imani’s!” she says, pointing toward School One Junior Imani Shalalzai’s drawing of a potted plant. Imani is using markers to quickly fill her paper with a colorful array of oranges, greens, and blues. In the space around the plant, she makes patterns that complement the shape of her subject.
Before Shalalzai started taking the intergenerational class, she says the age gap was definitely on her mind.
“For me personally, I was kind of scared at first, but when you get into it, it really feels like you’re just in a classroom with peers. Despite the age difference, I think everyone in common has an interest for art. I mean, we’re all taking an after-school class for three hours, all because we really want to do this. And so it makes it a lot easier to interact with everyone despite the age difference.”
The class is taught by Michael Gunn, a recent Rhode Island School of Design graduate living in Providence. Gunn describes his art as being filled with puzzles, riddles, and paradoxes.
“I think is the goal is that when I get to the end, I want to have more questions than I have answers about them.”
He also says teaching the intergenerational course is a full-circle moment. While growing up in a rural part of Northwestern Pennsyvlania, Gunn was introduced to art while participating in a community art course that mixed teenagers and older adults together.
“It was a really formative time for me. I think I was going through massive transitions in who I was identifying as a person, as an individual. I don’t think a middle school boy from Seneca, Pennsylvania, is normally painting. So in that space, I had a lot of agency to work through my own thoughts and feelings.”
When the class ended, Gunn moved their practice to their basement, taking all the fundamentals they had learned with them. A few years later, Gunn was accepted to RISD.
“At that time, I was like, yeah, I’m a painter. I’m an artist. And I knew it because of how I felt in that class.”
This story is part of our Finding Hope Project. Finding Hope is generously sponsored by Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross & Blue Shield Association.
