Rain Barrel Project Underway at Mt. Airy Art Garage

Elexus Turner is a seventh grader at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in Germantown. 

She has a paintbrush in her hand, and she’s concentrating—hard.

“This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this,” Turner said.  “It was challenging at first, but it eventually got easier.”

What Turner is doing is painting a rain barrel.  The rain barrel has an eye drawn on it with hands for eyelashes.

The hands spell out “love” in sign language.

I ask Turner if the barrel is a visual representation of how she and her classmates communicate with the world.

“Exactly,” she says back to me in sign language.

When Linda Slodki opened the Mt. Airy Art Garage, she imagined it as a community space.

“I wanted to bring artists out of isolation,” Slodki said.  “I wanted this to be a community space, too.  I wanted it to be a place where artists came together, and then their work went back out to the community in some way.”

The art garage’s rain barrel project fits that description—exactly.

Working with the Mt. Airy Business Improvement District, the art garage has painted several rain barrels to be distributed on Germantown Avenue.

“The BID obtained the barrels,” Slodki said.  “And they asked us if we wanted to do something with them.”

Slodki said yes.

First, they asked artists who work out of the garage if they wanted to participate.  Slodki got a few nibbles.

“Some people said right away that they were in,” Slodki said.  “But then the barrels started showing up on Facebook, and then everyone else wanted to paint a barrel.”

Slodki added, “That was just phase one.”

Slodki received another round of barrels from the BID, and this time she thought she would try something really different.

“I wanted to get people of all ages and all abilities in here to see what they could do,” Slodki said.

Slodki wanted to get different groups into the garage; groups that were representative of Northwest Philadelphia.

“I wanted people from Germantown, Mt. Airy and Chestnut Hill,” Slodki said.  “So we got students from CW Henry, elders from Homelink.  We had students from Germantown High School in here as well as students from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.”

“It’s amazing what each age group brings to the project,” Slodki said. 

She said that she was struck by the enthusiasm the younger kids brought, the skill and maturity the high school kids had and the way the seniors have worked outside of their comfort zone.

“When we first called Homelink with the idea for the project they told us no one wanted to do it,” Slodki said.  “Everyone said, ‘I’m not an artist.’”

Now look what they’ve done.

Editor's Note: The conversation with Elexus Turner took place with a sign language interpreter present.  I do not know sign language, so many thanks to her.