“Our mission is to make the art accessible, to help children feel creative confidence and a connection to themselves and their community,” said Heidi Rich, the executive director of Art Buddies, a nonprofit that for almost 30 years has been connecting elementary school students with mentors.
Their Creative Character program, Rich said, gives the students a chance to build a superhero that’s based on who they are and an issue they care deeply about. “They build that costume and write stories and create comics and sometimes songs and dances and spoken word, and really, really let us know who they are through their creative expression.”
It also gives them a lot of one-on-one time with a caring, creative adult. Each buddy pair gets a booklet that the two work on together, exploring their favorite books, movies, holidays, and heroes. The “big buddy” helps the child flesh out their superhero character and come up with a name. By the time they start making the costume, they know each other well.
Costume-making was an improvisational art, a series of decisions dictated by the materials at hand — bins of fabric scraps, ribbons, shiny paper, strings of beads and feathers, plastic flowers, fake fur. The students headed to the bins and held up materials to show their buddies across the room. Adults and students huddled over glue guns, cut cardboard to which they liberally applied fabric and brightly colored contact paper.