 When
ceramist David Furman arrive in Peru to carry out the work of his Fulbright
Fellowship, his most daunting challenge wasn´t the language barrier. It
wasn´t the chaotic 45 - minute bus ride, either, which took him each day
from his modest basement apartment to downtown Lima. And it wasn´t the work
of the fellowship itself - working with 11- to -15 - year-olds, many of
them raised in abject poverty, to create a beatiful tile mural in a low-income
community on the outskirts of Lima. When Furman arrived at the Escuela Nacional
de Bellas Artes, his most pressing concern was that there simply weren´t
any work spaces for his students. No functioning potter´s wheels, and even
more important, no work tables - and no place to buy them either.
Furman spent the first
two months in Lima, teaching college student to create and install two murals
on their campus. Then he devoted another two months to helping those students
serve as mentors to impoverished children attending middle school. Throughout
the fellowship, he imparted his love of the tile - making craft and the
pre - Columbian images that grace the art of ancient Peru.
Furman has traveled
to Latin America numerous times. As the years have passed, he has become
more and more interested in using ceramics to reach students who haven´t
been exposed to art. The turning point may have come in the mid - 90´s,
when Furman was asked to take part in the Ontario Teen Center, a facility
where Pitzer College students and faculty advised students from working-class
backgrounds. Furman helped found the Ceramics Project, which provided a
space - three days a week, four hours a day - for children to throw pots,
work with clay and find their own creative voices. During those years, Furman
ricocheted from the solitary environment of creating art to the classroom
to the communal existence of the Teen Center, where he worked with kids
whose older borthers and sisters were already joining gangs or selling drugs.
The surprise, said Furman, was that it was so satisfying.
By 1999, Furman had
laid plans for a return to Lima, to create a similar program that inspired
college students to introduce art to much younger - and needier - students.
The proposal, titled "Building Community Through the Collaborative Art Process",
would take him back to the country he loved. Despite his familiarity with
the culture, there was an adjustment period for Furman and dozens of colleg
students. Furman had three classes totaling 73 students. The burgeoning
army of would-be ceramists was assigned to create 420 brightly colored tiles
that would form the murals at Bellas Artes, known in English as the National
School of Fine Arts. The third month of the fellowship led Furman and his
students out of downtown to Montenegro, an impoverished area on the outskirts
of Lima. It was there that Furman´s students served as mentors, advising
more than 200 middle - school students on a second round of tile-making
and mural assembly. The project brought color and a new craft to the children
of Fe y Alegría No. 37, a middle school whose name means faith and happiness.
With their college-age mentors, the students learned about firing and glazing
and painting. Despite their economic disadvantages, the children took and
immediate interest. "The outcome, of course, was unbelievably successful",
said Furman. "All these students who had never worked with tiles or art
or color, given the barrenness of the environment they lived in, just blossomed
like flowers. And now the 5-by-22-foot mural is up at the school, in the
central courtyard".
He is already laying
plans for a return to Lima, where he hopes to carry out another service-learning
class. For now, he takes satisfaction from the e-mails he receives describing
how the students of Bellas Artes are helping to create more murals in Montenegro
and have even headed south to work with children in the fishing community
of Pisco.
Adapted
from "The Potter´s Clay", by David Zahniser. In "Pitzer", Fall 2000, pp.10-11.
David Furman is a professor of ceramics at Pitzer College. Professor Furman
received a Fulbright grant to Peru in 2000. |
