| The Just for Girls After School Program provides after school programs for adolescent girls in targeted schools in Baltimore City as a positive youth development approach to preventing teen pregnancy and promoting self-esteem... It is sponsored by Catholic Charities and operates in in Southeast Baltimore with 4th-7th grade girls.
“I have found that the artwork that my students have been doing has been so consistently and clearly reflective of the work of adolescence: establishing identity. With these 9-13 year old girls, identity seems to be drawn first and foremost with the broad strokes of gender. I feel like I could create a modern Rosetta stone of symbols that I see repeated over and over again in these sites and in previous work with girls of this age. Hearts and flowers show up over and over again,and do not function as the statement of artistic individualism or an attempt at innovation that is valued in the prevalent art model. Rather they serve as a public testament of belonging to a group., a sisterhod identified by these symbols.
Jewelry making is a way to make tangible an expression of identity that is displayed in literally a very personal way, on the body of the person who made it. I loved to make jewelry growing up and was excited to share this experience with my students, and thrilled to see glimmers of that former joy in their engagement with the process. At a sleepover at William Paca Elementary, we all made charm bracelet inspired jewelry that expressed our interests and things that were important to us.
It was also important to me for the girls to have an opportunity to translate this sisterhood of symbolism into a relational act of sisterhood. It was from this idea that the bracelet project was born. Both of my sites created macrame bracelets to exchange with girls at another Catholic Charities program, St. Vincent’s Residential Treatment Center. The question was posed of what positive things do you want to wish for another girl, very muchlike you? The answer to this question was communicated through the symbolism of the colors they chose,
drawn from a variety of cultural traditions, and explicated in a letter they wrote. It was inspiring to see how readily the girls signed on to this project and put such genuine effort into sharing their good wishes for these girls they had never met. When they recieved their bracelets that another girl had made for them, they were touched, by the gesture, and comforted by the familiar visual language that the gifts contained.
I think there need to be places that young people can share and celebrate their developing selves, and learn to value other's expression of the same. This is the place and positive atmosphere that I am trying to create in my program, encouraging this sisterhood of symbols to take shape as a sisterhood of interpersonal support as well.”
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