About the CAC Member and Site (2016-2017):

McKinley Wallace served at Access Art, a youth-centered after school program to address the artistic, emotional, and cognitive development of middle and high school participants. McKinley served with another CAC Member, Sara Kaltwasser, and together they developed innovative creative arts projects for their middle school students. McKinley specifically led the process of developing a design for a mural to combat bullying issues

"Addressing the issue of bullying through Action Painting"

Years ago, before I started working at Access Art, a group of teens in the program wrote a grant to create a mural at Morrell Park Elementary/Middle School. This mural would depict how bullying affects their community, in and outside of school. Based on their poignancy and independent voices highlighted throughout the application, they were awarded funding to create the collaborative mural artwork. Unfortunately, due to various reasons, the mural project had to be postponed. Since then, the collective of teens that wrote the grant have left Access Art, and a new set of youth has taken their places.

In December 2016, my co-teacher (Sara Kaltwasser, another CAC member) and I began developing an anti-bullying curriculum for January 2017 to explore the complexities of bullying through art and to set foundations for the mural making process. On January 11, as part of the Anti-Bullying (Agents of Change) curriculum, Access Art youth were introduced to the concept of action painting (i.e. Abstract Expressionism), it's historic relevance, and how it can be used to express how bullying makes them feel. The main goal was for the youth to learn how to articulate and document emotions through non-representational mark-making. Each participant wore a full-body, painting cover-up and was given brushes, rags, dowels, and, oil bars to make textured marks that exemplifies emotional adjectives they identified with.The action-painting lesson did not go exactly the way Sara and I had planned, which was expected. Due to the openness of the project, youth were not always considering their marks as a commentary against bullying. However, with healthy reminders, reflections, and refinements after the first day of action painting, the youth were able to complete two confident works of art by taking risks. The project was messy, and extremely satisfying. The youth had so much fun getting really messy, and using gestures of the body to create abstract marks. The project also helped them understand how to better articulate strong emotions that they feel each day, which is so important for middle school students.