Visual artist Colleen Comer recently spent an hour and a half with eighth-graders at Mobile County Training School in Prichard, leading one session in a four-week arts series built around a single question: who are you?
The classes are part of the Mobile Museum of Art’s “Who I Am” project, a residency that rotates through visual art, creative writing, music and multimedia before wrapping with student-designed final projects. Elizabet Elliott, the museum’s curator of programs and a Fairhope native, said the curriculum was deliberately aimed at early adolescents.
Why eighth grade
“A program about identity is really a lot more powerful in early adolescence,” Elliott said. Decisions about clothes, haircuts and taste carry enormous weight at that age, she noted, and the program tries to give students already wrestling with those choices a broader perspective on meaning and identity.
Mobile County Training School was selected from among Mobile County schools that have trimmed or eliminated their art programs for lack of funding, and Elliott pointed to the school’s setting near Africatown as central to the choice. In a neighborhood where family history and heritage carry deep weight, she said, questions of identity are especially meaningful for the students.
Built on identity and autobiography
The four-week sequence moves logically toward autobiography: students design book covers as though they had already written their life stories, then move into creative writing, then a music unit framed around “the movie of your life.” Four working artists were hired alongside museum staff — Comer as visual artist, writer and performer Alfred Ward, and multimedia artists Duane Knight and Rufus Ducote.
The project builds on groundwork laid the previous year, when the museum hosted the students for identity-themed tours of its collection and a summer reading assignment researching their own family histories through old photographs. When the classroom sessions end, the museum plans a closing reception where students can exhibit their work and perform.
Funding came through Mobile County Commissioner Merceria Ludgood, without whom Elliott said the program would not have been possible. The stated goal, she added, is for students to understand their heritage well enough to imagine themselves ambitiously — “something great and something important” — and take ownership of who they become.