Metro Arts Makes the Jump to Jump Street

Metro Arts Makes the Jump to Jump Street

by Karla Vierthaler

There will soon be an overwhelmingly strong vision of hope on Walnut Street in downtown Harrisburg. Urban settings don’t generally offer scenes that provoke strong emotional reactions, not ones that are hopeful at least. But in a couple weeks, when you enter the Harrisburg Police’s 911 call center, prepared to be inundated with art.

The center will be graced with a huge “positive message” mural produced by students from the Cornell Abraxis School on 14th and Market Streets. The school was created to reroute kids who were headed in the wrong direction, kids that police at the center might soon be getting calls about. Local artist Michelle Green has been aiding students create a mural for the station, providing them with arts skills and an opportunity to occupy their time with creativity and positive interaction.

Poetic irony, isn’t it? That creating a mural for the police has kept kids out of trouble. It’s the power of art; and that’s why Metro Arts, the group who organized the police mural program and many others like it, is changing its name.

Metro Arts has been around since 1978, beginning as The People Place. The organization has housed art galleries, dance studios, the Greater Harrisburg Arts Council, the Harrisburg Performing Arts Company, and the Allied Arts Fund. It’s a staple in Harrisburg’s art community, funding budding artists, enabling local youth, displaying unknown talent.

And everyone involved wants to make the organization bigger and better.
So why the name change? According to Russel Swanger, chair of the former Metro Arts, Jump Street better illustrates the group’s purpose. “Many people in the arts community felt there was on overlap in what we do compared to Allied Arts. We don’t do what Allied Arts does.”

Allied Arts, he explained, basically holds fund-raisers and receives grants to fund local arts programs. Jump Street implements arts programs. Although the program also serves as a re-granting agency for the Pennsylvania partners for the Arts and provides council and facilities for beginning artists, Swanger said art education, particularly for at-risk youth, is the groups primary focus.

“This organization was running its cycle, and we’re off doing new things,” says Executive Director Bob Welsh. In the past, Metro Arts filled many functions within the art community, and grassroots art programs is the niche they find themselves in now. “We don’t do what everyone else does because they do it so well,” said Welsh.

And that is where Jump Street comes in. “Jump Street is a place where new things begin,” reads the program explaining the name change. “Jump Street is a place where we ‘jump start your art,’ a place that levels the playing field, a place that is accessible and open to the communities we serve.”

It’s quite true. Metro Arts has become a staple in our urban schools, providing education and opportunities to more than a handful of kids. It’s also become a stable to emerging artists. Metro Arts has become the Mother Teresa of Harrisburg art community.

There’s Paintin’ Lively, making teens into consigned artists. These kids were paid this summer to paint the park benches at the new Steelton park. Most of the young adults have stuck with the program since its inception last summer. When they graduate high school, the teens will have business and arts skills, not to mention some extra cash from their work.

The Gift of Music program, which provides instruments to kids through community donations. The program actually supplied enough instruments to the Ronald. H. Brown Carter School to begin a music program. The school hired a teacher and a band was created through the donations.

Words In Motion, an after-school program where kids write, produce, and act in their own play. Dr. Dorothy King from Penn State University came to inner city Harrisburg schools, and spent 10 to 12 weeks helping third through seventh graders prepare for a performance of their original work.

“On Jump Street we are committed to breaking down barriers and taking artistic expression to the streets, to the communities, to the schools and into the neighborhoods.”

A new name, a redefined focus, and commitment to progress. Jump Street, it’s a place where new things begin.