On Friday, May 16 the Exceptional Children’s Foundation hosted an open house to celebrate its brand new Downtown Art Center and Art Gallery.
ECF artists, their friends and families, along with art instructors, ECF board members and staff filled the brand new art center and gallery.
“It was in 1968 that ECF defied the status quo and designed one of the first state’s first fine-arts training programs for individuals with developmental disabilities,” ECF President/CEO Exceptional Children Foundation Scott Bowling said. “Since then clients have provided and undeniable lens through which the community can access the truly unique and creative abilities of our program participants.”
The ECF artists range in age from 18-65 and have different disabilities, including intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, autism, physical disabilities, as well as emotional and psychiatric disorders. Through ECF’s Art Center Program, which is modeled after master’s five level fine arts programs, art instructors teach students to focus on creating contemporary art for display at high-end galleries.
“What we do is we allow them to access their own personal muses and project that into something that they create. The art work serves as a vehicle to shine a big spotlight on our organization and show the unique abilities of people with developmental disabilities,” Bowling said. “That is what the art serves as. When an artist sells a piece of art work, they receive fifty percent of the sales’ proceeds and the other fifty percent returns to the program to pay for supplies and keep the programs running.”
Art instruction includes training in acrylic and oil painting, printmaking, ceramics, watercolors, sculpting, photography and digital imagery. For ECF art instructor Eugenia Barbuc, working with artists with developmental is more about providing the artist a vehicle for expression than teaching them the art itself.
“They have such an innate ability that for me it is really just about adding different elements that they might not have thought of such as different materials, different ways of creating the same idea,” Barbuc said. “For instance, if you have someone that can really draw, we can teach them how to make it into a 3D object. For me it is about adding different elements that they (students) are not aware of, or which they did not know that they could add.”
The impact that ECF has on the artist is also felt by the family members who witness firsthand the change in their loved one. For the parents of ECF artist Sandy Challe, Armando Challe and Josefina Magaña, ECF has allowed their daughter to change her life for the best in a short six months.
“It is incredible; she was so depressed that she didn’t do anything,” Armando Challe said. “She has overcome a whole lot in comparison to how she was before. Now she is really dedicated to painting as well. She draws and now she also paints and now she is taking classes where they teach her about clay.”
“She has changed a lot,” Sandy’s mother Josefina Magaña said. “She is doing very well and what she built with the clay is really pretty. Her attitude and the way she was, has changed a lot. She is more in the mood to do things.”
Throughout the years thousands of pieces have sold. In 2013 the DAC Gallery became one of a few galleries across America that was selected to join a new Amazon.com initiative called Fine Art on Amazon. More than 700 pieces created by ECF students are featured on the DAC Gallery’s Amazon. com website, www.ECFonAmazon. com.
“Sometimes the very first successes of one of our clients, is done through what they create,” Bowing said. “They are told all their lives what they can’t do so when they become successful artist through their creations, ceramics, drawings, or paintings, sometimes self esteem grows through that process.”
The DAC Gallery is located at 431 S. Broadway in Los Angeles. ECF provides programs and services to more than 3,200 individuals of all ages. ECF has 15 program sites located throughout Los Angeles County, including their office in Culver City, located at 8740 Washington Blvd.