Miller, Nicole M., A Sculptor Who Shapes Young Artists' Minds: Classes Help Kids Create on Capitol Hill, Washington Post: p C05 (26 July 2001).

A Sculptor Who Shapes Young Artists' Minds
Classes Help Kids Create on Capitol Hill

Ten-year-old Jasmine transforms into a vampire princess when she puts on her elaborate gold mask with a mass of curly black paper hair. At her feet, two bickering goblins, Tracy, 10, and Alexandra, 11, hold square foam masks and perch on giant orange pillows. This posse is plotting against the good princess.

The skit's story line isn't quite clear yet, but Kris Swanson will help the kids sort it all out.

"They're my guinea pig group," says Swanson, a sculptor, about her first art class. Or more accurately, her first paid class.

For six years, Swanson has been teaching art to kids from her neighborhood, many of them from troubled or financially strapped homes. For six years she did it free of charge, spending her own money on everything from art supplies to bags of groceries that she'd sometimes give to children and their families. That relationship, of course, hasn't been all one-sided.

"Collaborating with kids and hanging out with kids' art has become an intrinsic part of my process," says Swanson, who has made a career working in bronze. "I'm very bored with self-important art. There's this wonderful irreverence between kids and their art."

Lately, as she tries to make a go of this new business, she's also been trying to work some of that childhood irreverence into her own creativity. She is, she says, an artist in transition.

"It seems like I bit off a little more than seems reasonable," Swanson says, sounding exhausted after the start of her second week of classes. She knows all about the challenges of teaching, it's just that being paid for what you do makes everything so different. "I feel like it has to be more goal-oriented because people are actually paying for it," says Swanson, who charges $160 for eight sessions over two weeks.

Swanson's work with children started in a house she rented on E Street SE near the Potomac Gardens public housing complex. She casually invited some kids over to finger-paint one day. Soon a dozen children were showing up regularly. Swanson fed them, hired them to do household chores and came up with art projects. When she moved to an apartment on 11th Street near Lincoln Park, the kids followed.

But she didn't mind. Their presence was having an impact on her own work. She's been a bronze artist since 16, and creating public monuments since the early '90s, including six commissions in her home state of California.

"The appealing thing about bronze is, it's so permanent and impermeable. It's both the blessing and the curse. It's daunting," she says. Creating art with kids "takes you out of your own ego and puts the play back into the process, and, I would say, the pleasure back into the process."

It was Swanson's father, a representational painter, who taught her to shape her Play-Doh sculptures with realism.

She always knew she would be an artist. After college she spent a year trying to make it as a sculptor, but it was too hard financially. She became a horse trainer instead -- her other childhood passion. It took her eight years to work her way around to pursuing art again full time. She hasn't turned back.

She moved to Washington in 1995. In April Swanson and her husband, Roy Mustelier, bought a house at the corner of Ninth Street and South Carolina Avenue SE. The first level had once been a grocery store. When Swanson first saw the building, she said, "It's overpriced. It's derelict. It's too much work. But it's so right in so many ways."

The two-story, red brick corner property's big room on the ground floor- which had been abandoned for 32 years - is perfect for a studio and classroom. She's hired some of those first kids she taught from Potomac Gardens to serve as assistants in this new teaching venture. She even received a grant from the Capitol Hill business association, CHAMPS, to pay them. It's early yet, but so far Swanson says she's breaking even -- despite the fact that she's been willing to reduce her fee for those who have trouble paying the full amount.

This year she also decided to turn down another California commission because she worried that the work -- which can last up to a year and a half -- would take her away from the kids too much.

"Now I'm making a life here," she says.

Behind her garage is a garbage bag filled with broken glass from a junkyard windshield. Swanson plans to use the glass, along with tile, as the border around 2 bronze wall panels she's cast to complete the work for a City Arts Project grant.

"I always want to do art for public space," says Swanson, who involved her students in the work. "I love how the community comes together over public art."

In the meantime, though, there is the teaching to focus on. Back in her art class, Swanson talks to Jasmine, Tracy and Alexandra about their skit and the art of improvising.

"What's improvised?" Alexandra asks.

"It means," Swanson tells them, "you make it up as you go along."