In the past eight years, Meyer has presented the works of
2006 Exponent Award Recipients
by Carol Guzy
Corcoran Youth Arts Community Outreach Project
Columbia Pike Photography Project
Shield of Faith by David Horn
Life Pieces to Masterpiece's Shield of Faith
has 8 values you can use.
It doesn't matter which faith, with a touch
of every color on the rainbow,
Following these steps will make
God's face glow.
With Spiritual Principles you will know
what you believe in.
And with Meditation you can center yourself,
worry about nothing but breathing.
Loving is your mind state,
it is what you're thinking.
Giving is providing without expecting
anything in return.
And there's so many kinds of languages
you can learn.
Whether it's other languages or
expressing your feelings,
It all takes place in the process of healing.
Arts can be anything with creation,
it can be real life or animation.
Combine these six values
and you'll get Discipline,
Which eventually leads to Leadership.
LPTM Anacostia River Chant
Cleanse our water
Cleanse our land
Heal every woman
Heal every man
Joy overflowing
Love in the land
Hope ever growing
Let peace expand
The Meyer Foundation presents rotating exhibitions of visual art created or presented by our grantees. The idea for the exhibit came from Senior Program Officer Kathy Freshley in 1999. Shows rotate between professional arts organizations who typically present the work of emerging artists, youth development organizations that use visual arts as a means of training and supporting young people's professional growth, and grantees featured in Meyer's annual report.
Current Exhibition:
Life Pieces to Masterpieces
www.lifepieces.org
The Meyer Foundation is currently presenting fifteen new sewn and collaged canvas paintings from Life Pieces to Masterpieces (LPTM), a non-profit, arts-based youth development organization serving African American boys and young men, ages 3 to 21, who live in low-income and public housing east of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC. LPTM provides these "Apprentices," with opportunities to discover and explore their creative abilities. LPTM youth are taught to take the everyday stories of their life and share them through painting. In this sense, their artwork becomes a meditation on creating something beautiful out of pieces, and creating masterpieces.
The organization's emblem and badge is a Shield of Faith that represents the artistic and spiritual values embodied by the program. The shield 's eight colors represent different principles: red represents Spiritual Principles, which complements green, representing Meditation. Orange represents Loving, which complements blue, representing Giving. Yellow stands for Language, complementing violet, which represents the Arts. By mixing a few colors they arrive at brown, which represents Discipline, and by mixing all the colors, they get black, which signifies Leadership.
Two series of paintings are in the exhibition, five from A Tale of Two Rivers and ten from Shield of Faith. The LPTM gallery exhibition will be up through August 2008. Questions about purchasing a painting should be directed to Mary Brown, Executive Director, at 202-399-7703.
A Tale of Two Rivers
The genesis for A Tale of Two Rivers series was the opportunity for the Senior Apprentices to take a wilderness river trip in Utah. This led to the exploration of the Anacostia River, the neighborhood river that divides the city physically, culturally and economically. The boys worked with the Anacostia Watershed Society to learn about the river's ecosystem and historic significance. They participated in watershed education, recreation, restoration, and clean-up activities. The culmination of this work was a twenty-two mile, three-day journey up the Anacostia River by foot, canoe, and bike that retraced a potential Underground Railroad route to an actual Quaker safe house in Sandy Spring, Maryland. The five paintings in the series were made in response to what they learned and experienced.