By Hillary Jackson
University of Southern California
“Maybe if you narrow down your focus on “Snow Queen,” at the core what you want it to say about relationships, maybe that might help you figure out which direction you want it to go,” Luis Pichardo says to Laura Davila, 19 at a back table in the East LA Public Library.
“Do you want to try working on it right now?”
“Sounds good,” she says, and the two return to writing.
Similar exchanges happen most Friday afternoons at the library. Pichardo, a writer, photographer and painter can be found mentoring art students across L.A. when he isn’t working on his latest piece. He helps creative youth develop their craft to become working artists.
The mentorship is more than a critique. Last week Pichardo discussed scheduling Davila’s placement test for community college and her short story, “Snow Queen.”
Davila started writing “Snow Queen” after not liking “Frozen” when she saw it last December.
When she discussed the “really bad” deviations from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale in the movie with friends, Davila decided to write her own version.
“I wanted to make it into something that I enjoyed more than “Frozen” and give an urban fantasy element to it like I do with most things.”
Davila credits her ability to get lost in her own world to her blindness. She has been unable to see after being injured in a firearm accident when she was six. Navigating the red tape involved with accommodating her blindness can be challenging. It comes with lots of paperwork. She hopes to get a guide dog, but that takes time. For now, Pichardo is pushing her to file paperwork for an aide to help her with her entrance exams so she can qualify for the scholarship she needs for school.
Davila is one of seven students in Pichardo’s program, DSTL Arts (Develop Skills, Transcend Limits Arts). Most of the students came from referral sources, like teachers. They must be either from a low-income family, have an individualized education plan (IEP) or a 504 plan, or be in current or past foster care.
Pichardo can relate to students from these backgrounds because he’s been there himself. Growing up in a primarily immigrant community in San Diego County, he knows what it’s like to grow up without resources and have neighborhood pressures. He credits the FBI shutdown of his street’s meth lab for deterring him against joining neighborhood gangs. He also believes it, and support from his mom, helped him develop his love for art.
“When I was in high school, after my parents got divorced, art became a much more important part of my life. It helped me express myself more, and get through my days,” he said.
“Not really having a person I could talk to about it, I felt isolated a lot of times. It took me a little while to feel like I could make a career as an artist.”
He wanted to be someone students from similar backgrounds could talk to. He and his fiancé, a creative writer and English teacher, developed DSTL Arts to support young artists. Fuentes is the DSTL Arts program director and handles many of the behind-the-scenes details.
Through the program, Pichardo provides mentorship to students interested in creative writing or the visual arts. Unlike other art non-profits, DSTL Arts isn’t focused on cultivating art skills, but further developing them to have students ready to be working artists.
The program is currently supported by private donors and the sales of Pichardo's and students' work. Because of the program's young age and need for more funding, there is no central location. Pichardo is mobile. He mostly meets students in public places around the city. Most Tuesdays he picks up Brian Andrade from Union Station, and they meet Ana Cristel Rivas in Little Tokyo. They find a spot like Starbucks to go over their work and go on photo walks. The two are part of the original three students in the program. The other student joined the military, but is still practicing art.
Even though the program is young, Pichardo has seen what he considers success in his students: growth.
For Cristel Rivas and Andrade, Pichardo has “Seen their work grow exponentially. They have come a very, very long way but not just in their arts practice but in their self confidence,” he said.
“In their ability to articulate their vision for their art and their vision as artists and now we are reaching a point in their development where they are promoting their work on their own, selling their work on their own and actually, in the case of Brian, teaching creative writing.”
One of Pichardo’s proudest moments was when Cristel Rivas had her first commissioned piece. The multimedia piece included balloons, one of her favorite things. Several creatures held the balloons and instruments.
“The point is we are all creators in a way and we all need each other to make something big, to make something greater than just ourselves,” she said.
She has also worked several events as a photographer and is occasionally contacted by people through Instagram to do photography for them.
For Pichardo, the growth in his original mentees speaks for itself. “It’s a testament of what we’re able to do in a short amount of time we’ve been around,” he said.
Despite their successes, it can be hard for the students’ goals to be taken seriously by their families. Pichardo said that for many low-income families, the arts are appreciated as an activity, but aren’t seen as a viable career option.
“My parents just see it as a hobby,” said Andrade, 19, who is from Los Angeles. “They see it as something that keeps me busy, keeps me out of trouble. I’ve always told them that its something I want to pursue and they sort of just listen but they don’t take it seriously.”
He said his parents switch from job to job and want him to become something more culturally esteemed, like a lawyer. Instead he's in college studying journalism and creative writing.
For Cristel Rivas, 20, who is also from L.A. and in college, wanting to be an artist is hard because her family wants her to be happy, but they are mostly headed toward the medical field. “My sister is studying to be a psychologist and my brother wants to be a pediatrician, so that leaves me wanting to be a photographer,” she said.
Her dad’s a mechanic and wants her to be happy, but to make a lot of money. “Every time my dad asks me ‘What do you want to be? What exactly are you doing with your life?’ I tell him, ‘I’m doing something right now. I’m trying to sell my artwork,’” she said.
“He just doesn’t understand that because he doesn’t know art, he doesn’t really like art. I’m the one that’s trying to open his eyes and show him that it is something that I’m passionate about and I’m actually making a living of it.”
The cultural dissonance led Pichardo and Fuentes to the development of DSTL Arts’ founding principles: to have a program that is able to teach students how to articulate the value of art as a career.
“It’s culturally something that is misunderstood. The arts are not necessarily considered a career path, not in the same way that something like a science-related field is,” he said.
“Most of our parents aspire that for us, but those aren’t necessarily the aspirations that we have.”
His vision through the program is to create a career path for the students. “We [believe in] not just giving them the ability to display and sell their work through our programs, but teaching them the way to go to school to get a bachelor’s degree or MFA in the arts if that’s what they want,” he said.
“The arts are really everywhere in our society, it’s just in how it’s presented. That’s what we’re teaching our students: to be aware, to pick up on these things.”
According to a 2011 report from the Americans for the Arts National Arts Index, there has been an increase of professional artists in the workforce. From 1996 to 2009, the number of working artists increased 17 percent, from 1.9 to 2.2 million. Pichardo knows first hand: working as an artist can be done.
After the owner loved her first commissioned piece, Cristel Rivas knows it, too.
“It made me feel like there’s a reason for doing art. A reason to continue because someone believes in me,” she said.
“Someone is paying me to do something that I love. It’s a really good feeling.”