New Brooklyn Art Studio Will Give Court-Involved Youth a Chance to Start Fresh

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN, NY — A vacant storefront in Downtown Brooklyn will be renovated and reopened in January 2017 as the home of a new program, in which teens can clear their records through a four-week performance workshop as an alternative to incarceration.

The empty storefront at 370 Schermerhorn St. will be donated and built out by Alloy Development, which is working with the local organization Recess and Brooklyn Justice Initiatives to establish the program.

Incarcerated youths — treated as adults by the New York State Criminal Court system — can have their cases closed and sealed and erased from their adult record if they complete the program.

The first four weeks of the program are court-mandated for teens ages 16 to 20 who want to complete the program. The next four weeks are optional — but people who complete the whole program are given a stipend and tools to reframe their own narratives, according to a press release.

About the artists teaching the workshops:

Shaun Leonardo

Shaun Leonardo’s artwork negotiates societal expectations of gender and sex, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and the experience of failure. In his work as an educator, Leonardo promotes the political potential of attention, self-reflection, and discomfort as a means to create awareness, disrupt meaning, and shift perspective. He has worked as an educator at the New Museum, the Fortune Society, Socrates Sculpture Park, Cooper Union's Outreach program and The Point (Bronx). Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received awards from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; The New York Studio School; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Art Matters; New York Foundation for the Arts; McColl Center for Visual Art; Franklin Furnace; and The Jerome Foundation. His work has been presented in galleries and institutions, nationally and internationally, and was recently featured in the exhibitions Crossing Brooklyn at Brooklyn Museum, Radical Presence at Studio Museum in Harlem, and Between History and the Body at 8th Floor Gallery. Leonardo’s current collaborative work, Mirror / Echo / Tilt, is funded by Creative Capital. Work samples and videos: www.elcleonardo.com

Sable Elyse Smith

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her practice considers memory and trauma while enacting an undoing of language. She works from the archive of her own body creating new syntax for knowing and not knowing, thereby marking the difference between witnessing and watching. To see is unbearable. She has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, Eyebeam, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Her work has also been screened at Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, London, Artist Television Access, San Francisco, and MoMA Ps1, New York. Her writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Studio Magazine and No Tofu Magazine and she is currently working on her first book. Smith has received grants & fellowships from Creative Capital, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She is currently part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design.

Salome Asega

Salome Asega is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher whose practice celebrates dissensus and multivocality. Through participatory research, she works collaboratively to build interactive installations and to develop odd wearables. She is the co-host of speculative talk show Hyperopia: 20/30 Vision on bel-air radio and the Assistant Director of POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships at Eyebeam, New Museum, and the Laundromat Project, and she has given presentations at New Inc, Performa, Eyeo, and the Schomburg Center. Salome received her MFA from Parsons at The New School in Design and Technology and her BA from New York University in Social Practice.

A gallery will soon open alongside the workshops so that the public can view the young artists' work as well. The gallery will be open Thursday through Saturday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Here are some of Shaun Leonardo's works:

Lead photo credit: Melanie Crean