Roxie, Mr. Bingo, Kewl and The Gate : Street Gangs in Kinston: Participating in One City's Game of Chance to Save Itself

Abstract

This project in pursuit of social and aesthetic experience involved the Kinston Community Council for the Arts, the Kinston Department of Public Safety and The Gate of Kinston (Gang Awareness Training and Education; a community center for the development of youth). Following the Gate's mission to increase advocacy among police officers and youth, this project comprised art sessions, two days a week, one and a half hours each day over the course of three months. Participants included Jasmine Coleman, Caleb Fisher, Tavon Green, Officer Kevin Jenkins, Tayler Morgan, Alexis Monshay Sutton and Sergeant Dennis Taylor. Youth and police worked together on screenprinted images which were publicly exhibited in February 2010 at Kinston Community Council for the Arts. The core group of five students and two officers investigated ideas of perception, projection and what makes someone "cool". All were offered opportunity to socially act in taking control of their images and vocationally act by studying the rudimental tools of visual art and developing the entrepreneurial skill of screenprinting (addressing the belief that part of the problem Kinston faces with gang affiliation is economically driven). Socially, this applied process provided an atypical and productive environment encouraging officers and students to speak and listen outside their typical street interactions. With much instability present in the daily lives of at-risk youth, screenprinting offers youth a tangible form of communication and control; a marketable skill executed with one's own hands. The objective was to ascertain whether process, product, or both could build social capital, affect social and/or socio-economic change. The narrative and place-making created together, the history and narrative of place and the transfer of entrepreneurial skills to the students, all carried weight in measuring this endeavor's investigation and pursuit of art as an agent of transformation.