click here to see the mosaic mural
Before I start, I’d like
to thank you all for coming and helping is celebrate and commemorate 100 years of juvenile
courts. I’ve been coming here for over a decade and never really felt very
comfortable here. Let’s just say that these chain link fences, the metal detectors,
the sea of randomly arranged patrol cars and the drab walls are hardly a welcome mat for
the people who come to address over 600 delinquency and dependency cases before this court
every day. Unlike to our sister courts, prior to today this one didn’t really welcome
you.
Art has transformed this place. Judge Bernstein, Judge Lederman and I saw the folks
from Bisazza put up the glass mosaic replica of this mural on the façade of this building
and were moved by the transformation. A transformation that will take place inside the
crowded waiting room upstairs today.
Naturally, none of this could have happened without the vision of Judge Bernstein,
who chaired this anniversary celebration, the leadership of Judge Lederman, Judge Langer
and the other members of the Juvenile Bench, and the efforts of Paul Indelicato and his
staff. And it certainly couldn’t have happened without the hours and hours hundreds
of caring people volunteered to put the weeklong celebration in place, or without the
financial contributions of many of this community’s corporate citizens. But I am
particularly grateful to Bisazza, North America, the consummate corporate citizen –I
first met them when they put my Niketown murals at the Shops at Sunset Place and since
then they haven’t learned to say no. Not only are they not making a profit on this
mural, it’s costing them money to produce it. Thank you Bisazza.
rtists
are called upon by society to help interpret their world. That’s an extraordinary
burden, tempered only by the fact that what we are asked to do is interpret, not make
sense of our world. That is particularly so in a place like this.
How do you make sense of a world like that of a sexually abused little girl who was
taken from her home and given shelter in the beautiful Gladstone Center. There is no
intervention or program in this world that would make sense for her, so when asked to do a
drawing about the 100th Anniversary of the Juvenile Courts, she clenched a
black Crayola and started garabataindo on the paper. In it she drew herself, a red
planet, and wrote, "I wanna go to Jupiter." Planet Earth made no sense to her.
She was among the first of over 500 kids served by the Juvenile Justice System who over
the past seven months allowed me into their world, and helped me interpret it.
One hundred years ago, forward thinkers created the Juvenile Justice world because they
thought that kids think differently. Emotionally, psychologically, mentally they were
different from adults. I remember driving back home from their residential programs on
long stretches of highway and thinking about their lives. Now and in the future.
I know many thirty-something's who do a lot of navel-gazing, and try to wrestle with
emotional baggage from younger years. Still angry a quarter century later because parents
paid more attention to their sister. Still legitimately scarred because someone ridiculed
them. And then I think of the barbed-wire facility I’ve left behind.
"What the hell were you thinking?" I ask a sea of sullen bodies garbed in
prison blue jumpsuits sitting around a large table pieced from smaller ones, in a dark
room pieced from the common area of the post-Hurricane Andrew trailers where they sleep.
"How did you wind up here, alone in this desolate facility in the middle of the
Everglades? Did you know this is where you’d wind up here when you stole your first
chocolate bar from 7-11?"
They fit the profile of most kids I saw in the detention facilities: Black or Hispanic,
bordering on illiterate. Poor. Abandoned. And scarred, deeply scarred. With a life ahead
of them.
Kids who disconnected from society to the point where they would inflict harm on a
total stranger without remorse. Except for now, when it’s too late. When at 16,
they’re hardened and have no place to go but down. When their teachers and parents
and society has given up on them. When they’re stuck in a place that seems more
punitive than rehabilitative serving kids who have already given up on themselves.
In goes the artist.
"What message do you have for kids who are sitting in the Juvenile Court waiting
room about to embark on your path?" "If you had one thing to say, what would it
be?"
Invariably, they admonished kids not to take their Dead End path. Surrounded by such
failure, they scorned those who thought they could somehow prevail by doing wrong. If they
only knew then that their path would have brought them here, they would have tried harder
to overcome life’s obstacles. They would have tried harder to cope with uncaring
parents, with insensitive professionals, with negative peer pressure, with juvenile angst.
In a sense, these kids who would harm perfect strangers (their victims) were now
helping perfect strangers (the 600 kids who will sit for three hours in the waiting room
everyday and read their messages). These strangers will never know who these kids are. And
the kids will never know who wrote the messages.
It’s not as altruistic as it looks; the process is subversive at heart. By
conceptualizing the message, they have begun to assess their circumstance. By articulating
a positive message, these messengers are beginning to reintegrate themselves into ordered
society. By having their messages permanently installed in this courthouse, they are
beginning to bond with society.
Before unveiling this mural you will listen to some of those 500 messages. Messages
that were collaged on this five-paneled canvas. So many messages, that we couldn’t
fit them on these pieces and had to add them to four other panels the kids from Regis
House have been helping me paint all week long.
In a sense it is fitting that this piece of art was created in a collaborative way,
with so many giving of themselves to make it happen. It is truly a metaphor for what needs
to happen if we want to make a difference in the Juvenile Justice system.
Even the art piece itself is a collaboration of mosaics. From up close it is made up in
little pieces. The fact that they are different is good --some appear more strategic or
colorful than others, but as you step back, they are all necessary. All 78,000 of them.
Essential. In fact, the farther you get the better it looks.
Today, I call on you to dedicate this mural as a conspicuous reminder of that we need
to work together to make sure that our kids’ life here on Earth is a worthy one. And
leave Jupiter for NASA satellite probes.
