The power of a vision: Art with a Heart touches the lives of students, volunteers

Ciera Harris, who will be a seventh-grader at St. Lawrence School in Indianapolis, works on a puppet of a character she read about during an Art with a Heart camp held on July 11 at St. Philip Neri School in Indianapolis. Carol Conrad, a member of St. Simon the Apostle Parish in Indianapolis and founder of Art with a Heart, looks on.

By Sean Gallagher

A beautiful work of art is often born of the vision of a solitary artist.

But once it is completed, the power of a masterpiece can grow as people behold it and are drawn into its beauty.

This is what has happened over the past five years with Art with a Heart, a visual arts education program created by Carol Conrad, a member of St. Simon the Apostle Parish in Indianapolis.

From 1995-2002, Conrad had given private art lessons through her Kaleidoscope of Art studio.

But after experiencing success through nearly three decades of teaching, Conrad felt the need to show her gratitude.

“We just wanted to say, ‘Thank you, God. You’ve blessed us beyond our wildest imagination,’ ” she said. “We wanted to make sure to give back the gift that [God] gave us.”

And so Conrad, her daughter, Kellie, (at the time a middle school student) and a handful of volunteers put on a week-long camp in the summer of 2002 at St. Philip Neri School in Indianapolis that helped the students learn art skills and integrate them with other academic disciplines.

Now, five years later, the masterpiece of gratitude that sprang from the vision of one faith-filled woman has touched the lives of thousands of students and volunteers through six weeks of summer camps held at several schools (many of them Catholic) in Indianapolis as well as after-school programs that run during the academic year.

Ciera Harris, who will be a seventh-grader at St. Lawrence School in Indianapolis, participated in an

Art with a Heart camp at St. Philip Neri School in July.

After reading a youth fiction book, she had to create a puppet that depicted one of the story’s characters.

“It’s better than any other sit-down [activity],” Ciera said. “It makes you understand [the story] more, and you get to stretch out and know more about it by doing different crafts.”

As Art with a Heart has grown far beyond her initial dream, Conrad has turned to God for help.

“A lot of the things that we’ve done should have been impossible,” she said. “It shouldn’t have worked. So we’re very often driven to our knees in prayer because we just can’t figure out how something’s going to work.”

A family affair expands

Great artists often have apprentices at their side.

One that has helped Conrad mix the pigments of prayer and a passion for art has been Kellie, a 2006 graduate of Cathedral High School who will be a sophomore at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.

“My mom has definitely been an outstanding role model for me. I look up to her probably more than anybody else,” Kellie said. “Pretty much everything she does is for other people.”

But from the start of Art with a Heart, Kellie has known that it takes a lot more than a love for art to make the program work. It also requires a lot of the nitty gritty work of recruiting volunteers and seeking funding through grants.

So, with the suggestion of her mother, Kellie helped establish Art with a Heart’s junior board.

This team of teenagers in turn inspired many more to volunteer in the program and so help scores of at-risk grade school students learn many important life skills.

Now that Kellie is in college, other young people are stepping up to help expand the impact of Art with a Heart.

One of them is St. Lawrence parishioner Sarah Siertle of Indianapolis. Although she’ll only be a sophomore at Bishop Chatard High School in the Indianapolis North Deanery, Sarah has already learned how to write convincing grant proposals.

Sarah has been taking art lessons from Conrad since she was in the fourth grade. But she has come to see that there is real creativity involved in doing the footwork of keeping a program like Art with a Heart going.

“You have to figure out what you’re going to do in the project and what’s going to go into the project,” Sarah said. “And then you have to figure out how to say it so you’re explaining it [convincingly].”

She must have learned the art of securing grants well because, through her work, Art with a Heart received nearly $6,000 from the United Way to purchase books and art supplies for the young students who participate in their summer camps and after-school programs.

Coming back to love

In the end, though, all of this hard work comes back to what Conrad and all of her volunteers truly love: art and children.

“All of the kids are so amazing and they want to be loved,” Sarah said. “They want to do good. I just love being around that.”

Loving the beauty of art and the innocence of children can lead Art with a Heart volunteers back to God.

“It’s kind of been making me stronger and closer to God,” said volunteer Cassie Borman, a member of St. Matthew Parish in Indianapolis who will be a Bishop Chatard sophomore.

“I know that God is in every single person, [but] sometimes you can’t see it. But when you help somebody, you can see it.”

Seeing so many teenagers and adults help young boys and girls and, at the same time, grow in their love of art and of God has been powerful for Conrad.

But she has been most affected by how her own adult children have grown in their dedication to loving service.

“I was scared to death that maybe they would go away and think that [I] was crazy,” she said. “The fact that they’ve now gone away and that hasn’t happened is just the greatest thing in my life.”

Her daughter, Kellie, though, is amazed by how the small vision of gratitude that started Art with a Heart has, like a gigantic mural, expanded across a broad canvas to touch the lives of so many people.

“Art with a Heart doesn’t just serve the kids. It also serves the volunteers,” she said. “We’re trying to serve everybody that we’re coming into contact with. And when you have that kind of a mentality, it creates positive situations.”

(Art with a Heart is in need of new board members. Those interested in learning more about the organization or in serving on its board can call 317-823-9555, ext. 60, or log on to www.koart.us/awah.) †