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TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 2017
Giving students ‘legacy’ through stained glass making Since 2006, The Stained Glass Project has donated 115 windows around the world. By KAIT MOORE For The Temple News After school let out on Jan. 4, the Kendrick Recreation Center in Roxborough filled with the sound of glass grinders and laughter. Andrew Garvey, a freshman at Parkway Northwest High School in the after-school arts program, cut red pieces of glass into the shape of a tire swing for a window he was working to complete. Paula Mandel, a 1974 fine art and psychology alumna, started The Stained Glass Project with her longtime friend Joan Myerson Shrager, a 1984 psychology alumna, 11 years ago. The program, which teaches stained glass window-making to Philadelphia middle and high school students, meets every Wednesday from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. “[When] our students come to this program I would say that 99 percent of them have never had an art class,” Shrager said. “So for them, art is a tool to investigate the world and not be criticized all the time. If you want to make a blue elephant with one orange ear, that is fine in our class. There is no wrong answer.” In 11 years, the program has donated at least 115 stained glass windows around the world to places like a primary school in South Africa, a school in New Orleans and a Native American reservation in Minnesota. Before the Stained Glass Project began in 2006, Mandel and Shrager formed a co-op art studio called ArtForms Gallery Manayunk. After she graduated from Temple, Mandel worked as an art therapy intern at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Juniata Park/Feltonville and was looking for a way to use her artistic background to expose Philadelphia students to art. In 2008, Mandel took a two-week group trip to South Africa to learn about South African history and culture. She met Barbara Mitchell, a retired Philadelphia school administrator and the founder of an afterschool program at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown on Germantown Avenue near High Street. The program was mostly geared toward academics, but Mitchell was looking to expand it with an art program. When the two met, Mandel explained her art background in painting and glass work as well as her desire to use art as a means to reach inner-city kids. Mitchell then asked Mandel to start a stained glass class for students at the church.
Mitchell felt that stained glass work would benefit her students even more than academic support alone. “When a student knows that they have made something this fantastic, it does wonders for the mind,” Mitchell said. The Stained Glass Project began as a small, monthly class for students to learn how to make stained glass necklaces and picture frames. It wasn’t until 2008, when Shrager and Mandel went to a fundraiser with Sharon Katz, a woman Mandel met in South Africa, that the program shifted to window-making. Katz was fundraising for a school in South Africa called Nsimbini Primary School that serves children impacted by HIV and AIDS. Shrager and Mandel saw an opportunity for their students to feel valued and memorialized in a way that Shrager said they often lacked in their home-life. “We tell them that stained glass
can last forever if it is well taken care of,” Shrager said. “So they could go with their grandchildren to see the windows that they made. And that really gives them a legacy and a feeling of empowerment in the world.” The program moved to the Kendrick Recreation Center in 2013, when Germantown High School closed. Mitchell estimates 150 students have graduated from The Stained Glass Project since it began, and nearly 99 percent of them have also completed high school, Mitchell said. “And the important thing is: When in [the student’s] lives do they have a chance to do something and ... donate it?” Shrager said. “I think there’s a lot of pride in our students that they have created something very beautiful that they then donate.” Nada Yaw Effah, a 2012 graduate of the program, credits the support and resources of the volunteers at The Stained Glass Project with his accep-
tance to Bloomsburg University. Effah often comes back to visit Shrager, Mandel and Mitchell. “It’s much like a mother and son relationship, but they aren’t really mom,” Effah said. “It’s a free type of relationship.” Shrager said whenever students have any serious problems, she and Mandel try to be there for them every step of the way. Mandel said the night she got a call that a student had been hit by a car as one of the most meaningful moments during her time with the project. “He put me down as his emergency contact before his foster moth-
er. I just hadn’t realized how connected he felt.” As the session on Jan. 4 wrapped up, Schrager looked over at four boys laughing at their reflection in a piece of stained glass. “Almost every kid in here has had a family member killed,” she said. “And I just can’t imagine the strength that it takes to keep going. They need love, and it is an absolute love affair in here.” kaitlyn.moore@temple.edu
KAIT MOORE FOR THE TEMPLE NEWS Top left: Mark Williams, a student in The Stained Glass Project, grinds a piece of glass. Top right: Lance Lucas creates a design that will be part of his completed work. Bottom left: DaShawn Belser with a piece of a window he is designing. Bottom right: Co-director Paula Mandel instructs Belser as he creates the design for his stained glass window.
Art group addresses sexual assault issues on campus A group of students hung banners and posters in order to start a conversation about sexual assault. By TAYLOR HORN Online Beat Reporter At the beginning of December, Take the Time, a group of five students in a self-guided community arts class at Temple hung up posters, stickers, banners and a sign that read: “Why don’t men have time to talk about sexual assault?” The banners were put in seven different spots around Main Campus, including the front of Tomlinson Theater, Ritter Hall, Saxbys on Liacouras Walk and the Bell Tower. Flyers and stickers bearing the same message were also put in the men’s bathrooms of some academic buildings. “[Sexual assault] happens in so many forms and it’s so common that it often flies under the
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radar, but it has a huge bearing on the way that gender and sex are viewed and how people are treated in the workplace, on streets, in their homes and essentially everywhere,” said one of the members of the group, a junior visual studies major. She asked not to be named in this story because she is a victim of sexual assault. They will not likely hang up any more signs on campus, since the initiative was part of a community arts class that ended last semester. Still, the group member said the group will maintain its email and Facebook page and hopes to host a conversation night at some point in the future, where both men and women could voice their opinions on the issue of sexual assault. “If I can get my friends who have never been affected by sexual assault to understand how to fight it anyway, if I can get strangers to feel comforted by the thought that other people care and want to change this oppressive force and if I can empower men who feel as though they can’t talk about it to talk about it, that’s a very fine start in my book,” she said. The original idea for the project was to host an event in which members of a fraternity or a men’s sports team, and volunteers could ask
each other questions about sexual assault, share their experiences and provide support to each other. The goal was to foster an environment in which a taboo subject could be discussed. The group member said she reached out to nearly 20 officers of fraternities and sports teams, but she received only two responses, both of which were negative. “This was frustrating to us so our question became, ‘Why don’t men have time to talk about sexual assault?’” she said. The team members turned to a different strategy, which included creating the stickers, flyers, banners and signs in hopes that people would take it upon themselves to start conversations about sexual assault even without the help of those organizations. The idea for the project began in September, and the group hung up the signs in November and December. The group member said most of the reactions she has received have been positive and encouraging, but some other students felt offended because the sign seemed to target men. The group member said she agrees the language can be problematic, especially for men who are
victims of sexual assault. “It made me happy to know someone was tackling the problem at hand in their own way,” said Samuel Trilling, a freshman political science and journalism major. “And although the topic is a little more nuanced than the statement makes it seem, it made me look, it made others look and it made us all think.” The group member said she received emails from other students, including sorority members, who were interested in incorporating the project into their programming. “This was personal to all of us,” the group member said. “I didn’t understand consent until a few months ago, because no one had ever asked me for it. I never understood until recently how much that had affected me and my relationships.” “It’s not unique to Temple, but raising awareness here is a start,” she said. taylor.suzanne.horn@temple.edu
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