Genius at Work

Designed by a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright, the 62,000-square-foot, honey-colored brick building houses Strickland's vision of a thriving community-learning center. Each day, struggling high schoolers and adult vocational students enter a stunning building of arches and circles designed to allow the sun to pour through - the way Strickland remembers the light in Ross's ceramics studio. "The worst thing about being poor is what it does to your spirit," says Strickland, "not just your wallet. I wanted to build something that would give the people who come here a vision of what life could be, to create an environment that says that life is good."

Strickland's done that - and more. He's brought all of his talents as an artist to bear to create a template for social change. "The planet's changing," says Strickland. "The whole culture, the language, the relationships - it's all new. The millennium is defining a different kind of artist, a different kind of entrepreneur, a different kind of leader than we've known before. This is my clay."

"Entrepreneurs and artists are interchangeable"

It's a typical classroom: Computers are lined along one wall, a few dozen institutional chairs with attached desktops are gathered in the center of the room. A bunch of ninth-grade students crack jokes or ask questions as they consider a fable about a cat and a fox.

But there is something just a bit, well, odd in this learning situation. First, there are the questions: One teenage boy asks, "Are we allowed to sew today?" And there are the materials: strips of papier-mache, bits of fabric, and pieces of string scattered everywhere.

The subject is a fable. But the teaching method is pure Manchester Craftsmen's Guild. These students - most of them considered "at risk" by the public school that has sent them here - are making puppets of the two lead characters in the fable. They've made papier-mache heads and bodies, and now they're sewing small costumes by hand.

Their work is the hands-on, creative phase of a lesson that began one month earlier. The Puppet Project, as it's called, started with a discussion of folktales, focusing on the way that stories can teach morals. The students watched a video of Pinocchio and discussed the story's lessons. Next they wrote a folktale of their own, with a clearly defined moral. Then they studied the fable of the cat and the fox. And now they're learning to approach the fable as an artistic endeavor - a hands-on, problem-solving exercise of constructing puppets that they will then use to stage the fable as a play.

This is Bill Strickland's take on the art of learning. It's got little to do with tradition, plenty to do with education, and everything to do with art. For three hours a day, these students come from nearby David B. Oliver High School - Strickland's alma mater - to study at MCG. The medium is art - the teaching staff uses photography, ceramics, painting, and drawing to convey academic subjects. The message is life.

This part of Strickland's program, called the Arts Collaborative, costs $500,000 a year, an operating budget that is funded by local foundations. Like MCG's after-school arts program, it builds on mentoring relationships that create educational learning and individual self-knowledge. Unlike that project, which runs as a voluntary arts-education drop-in center, attendance at the Arts Collaborative initiative counts for part of an accredited school day for participating kids from Oliver High School.

So far, it's working - and working more effectively than Oliver High School. The numbers tell the story: According to an independent consultant's analysis of the program's first two years, students in the Arts Collaborative missed far fewer days of class than did their peers at Oliver High School. And their grade-point averages were better - by a half-point for ninth graders and three-quarters of a point for tenth graders.

The use of art to change students' attitudes is at the heart of Strickland's vision of education. The goal is not to produce artists. It's to find an individually tailored approach to learning that will redirect troubled young people, and get them into college and on to productive lives. But Strickland does see a connection between the creativity instilled by a love of the arts, and the skills needed for business success in the new economy.

"Artists are by nature entrepreneurs, they're just not called that," Strickland says. "They have the ability to visualize something that doesn't exist, to look at a canvas and see a painting. Entrepreneurs do that. That's what makes them different from businesspeople. Businesspeople are essentially administrators. Entrepreneurs are by definition visionaries. Entrepreneurs and artists are interchangeable in many ways. The hip companies know that."