VERO BEACH — For years, Joy Eakin abided by the unwritten rule of abuse-conscious times – no hugs for the kids in her art class.
Every other week, her free class for seniors at the Vero Beach Museum of Art is joined by teenagers from a residential drug treatment program in Fort Pierce.
Convinced that some urges aren’t meant to be quelled, Eakin, the unofficial leader of the seniors, finally sent them all an e-mail: That’s it. I’m hugging.
“It was my decision and I told the rest,” she says, adding emphatically, “I think they need hugs.”
The Drug Abuse Treatment Association Hayslip Center, known as DATA, is the area’s only non-profit youth residential treatment center. The museum pays for classes not only at the museum but at the DATA center itself.
At last week’s class, as the teenagers filed in, Eakin was at the door with arms wide.
One by one, the kids obliged her with an embrace, with even the newest residents leaning in, if gingerly. It wasn’t entirely clear who needed the hugs more: Eakin, or the kids.
The intergenerational art class was dreamed up by a former museum education director, Anne Kraybill. Her initiative won a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Rather than scare off the older students, the addition of the DATA teenagers has actually drawn more seniors in.
“We had a great reception from both groups. They enjoy each other,” says Shanti Sanchez, the museum’s school and youth programs manager.
“These kids are one step away from juvenile detention and this is their last chance,” says Sanchez. “When this grant was first written, people said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. You’re going to put a bunch of those kids with a bunch of seniors?’ But we have never had that problem. They are so respectful of the seniors. And the seniors really get along with them.”
Sanchez stops by the class often. What she sees is striking: two distinct demographics, bent to the same task at shared tables, working on projects and canvases that end up looking surprisingly similar.
The classes are taught by two museum art instructors, Kim Weissenborn and Regina Stark. Weissenborn, a Parsons graduate and watercolorist who recently illustrated the children’s book of Windsor resident Cynthia Bardes, drives to the DATA center every other week to teach.
Over time, the mother of three sons starts to “fall in love with them.”
“When I was young, I used to be afraid of teenagers, until I had some of my own. But they’re just babies in big clothes. They’re so sweet and they’re all so different,” she says.
Regina Stark, a muralist from New York, teaches the weekly senior class.
Daughter of a painter, she is a lifelong artist as well as a hypnotherapist and art therapist.
“I’m the crazy teacher,” Stark says. “I teach the rules and then go, OK, how are we going to break them?”
Stark began Thursday’s class explaining abstract art.
“You’re not going to really look at something to do your piece,” she said, demonstrating on a Masonite board.
With a mirror overhead reflecting her technique, she dabbed gesso at a piece of newsprint, then she brushed paint over it with a sponge. She was blotting bubble wrap in the paint for texture when the kids started getting edgy.
“OK, looks like you guys are ready to start painting. Are you?”
“Yes!”
Lips pursed, brushes dipped, and paint hit the boards with zero goofing around. There was no hesitation about putting their creativity on public view. If the kids looked up, it was to check on a friend’s board or ask a question.
Minds seemed a million miles away from whatever got them here.
“We don’t dwell on their situation. It’s confidential and it doesn’t come up,” says Sanchez.
A typical stay at DATA is six months. Some stay a year or more if warranted. Most of the kids – 90 percent, according to one center staffer, are there at the direction of the courts.
Some come from comfortable backgrounds. One mentioned a family business on Vero’s barrier island. Another went to Beachland Elementary, and can still happily reel off names of his teachers.
Most, though, are from families that have known duress.
DATA’s activities director, Jennifer Ford, said one thing the “elderly” classmates showed the kids was that “marriages can last a long time.”
At least one student lives in foster care.
When asked if the seniors acted grandmotherly toward him, he shrugged.
“I wouldn’t really know what that’s like,” he said.
Instead, to the kids, the older students are more like peer teachers.
“These people know a lot about art and they can give you some good tips,” said one boy admiringly.
For the seniors, the art is secondary. They are there for the love of children.
“I miss interacting with younger people,” says Rosemarie Meiklejohn. “My grandchildren are all up in New Jersey. You lose touch with what’s going on in the world right now with young people. They have different attitudes and you get to see the differences, and how they respond to different things.”
“They’re just nice people,” said Lynn Davies with a tender smile.
She moved to Vero 30 years ago from South Africa, and heard of the class through the Senior Resource Center.
“I think it’s quite wonderful just to speak to them.”
Virginia Yunker, a nurse who raised six children, signed up for the classes last year after her piano duet club gave its final concert at John’s Island.
“I thought, I’ve got to do something else creative before I go back to Wisconsin in July. I thought I’d come a couple of times, but then I started coming back over and over.”
“I think coming here is a mission,” says Carla Laver, a 40-year veteran teacher who moved to Vero from Ohio. “I miss my own grandchildren and I miss teaching. I would love to bring joy to just one of these children, and maybe make a big difference in their lives.”
Last Christmas, the kids had to miss a class making Christmas cards. So three seniors and Weissenborn took them the cards they’d made.
“We brought them presents too, games they could play together, like dominoes,” Eakin says.
“Let’s face it: at our age we’re pretty much on the straight and narrow,” said Meiklejohn.
But she spoke up when last year one student assumed she hadn’t known anyone with drug problems.
Meiklejohn told him of a family friend who got high at a party and died diving into the shallow end of a pool.
“I told him something from my own life,” she says. “I don’t try to initiate anything. But I’ll react to something they say.”
Sanchez calls it “almost shockingly generous” that the museum funds such programs; it has paid for the both the senior and DATA classes since the NEA grant ran out.
There are also free art classes for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients and their caregivers.
Other classes are outside the museum. It sends teaching artists to schools, senior centers and youth centers in Fellsmere, Gifford, Roseland and Wabasso.
Prior to children’s museum field trips (the museum pays for the buses), art educators go to schools to prepare teachers and kids for what they’ll see.
The outreach effects seem lasting, at least for the DATA kids.
Sanchez remembers walking the beach one day and seeing a group of high school kids with sketch pads and pencils.
When she told them she worked at the museum, one former DATA student piped up.
“I used to go there,” he said.
Another came along with his girlfriend who was volunteering at the museum. “He was very proud of having come here,” Sanchez says.
Last week, the DATA bus arrived late. With less than an hour to get their projects finished, the kids worked with intensity on their abstracts, blending and blotting their square foot of board into bold chunks of color.
One boy, furiously sketching on the paper table covering from the moment class began, turned out to have been practicing drawing hearts, and a red heart went at the center of his square.
“You’d be surprised how good they are,” says Weissenborn. “I’ll go in there with an idea and think, Oh, the boys are going to think it’s really lame. And then they’re the ones that are enjoying it. The time is up and they’re still putting the glitter glue on.”
The seniors are surprising some people, too.
“My kids are flabbergasted I’m doing this,” Streeter says.