Every Wednesday, Northampton artist Sylvia Johnson holds an hour-long puppet-making workshop for children who live at Meadowbrook Apartments in Northampton.
Creating a puppet in their own image allows students to re-imagine themselves and project who they want to be, especially if “they don’t like who they see in the mirror,” explained Johnson, an artist who took courses in teaching preschool at Greenfield Community College, and has taught locally since the early 1990s.
“It’s healing,” Johnson said of the puppet-making process.
For example, one boy envisioned himself as a superhero and made a Spiderman puppet. Another made a doll with three eyes.
“He has double sight. It’s like he sees beyond,” she said. “I tell them I want them to go inside themselves and don’t think about anything else except this moment. Leave everything else behind. Zoom in on this moment, and let your hands work. Don’t think about anything sad.”
“There are some kids who come in and say ‘I hate myself,’ and by the end, they’re looking at the doll and saying ‘look what I did,’ ” Johnson said. “It’s a way of expressing and getting it out of yourself. And once it’s out, you can move on.”
Making puppets is also a way to introduce creativity and art to kids who otherwise might not get the chance, said Johnson. Some of her students come from challenging home environments, sometimes involving dysfunctional family dynamics or poverty, she continued.
During her workshops, Johnson shares life lessons and encourages her students — she has about three or four regulars but has had up to 15 children at once — while they work — a small act that has a profound impact, according to Noreen Beebe, 71, who brings her 9-year-old great-granddaughter, Jadalynn Depena, to the class.
Last summer, Beebe said that Jadalynn, who lives with her, was having trouble managing friendships. She felt like she could only be best friends with one person at a time.
“We were having some conflicts,” Beebe said. During the puppet-making classes, Beebe says Johnson showed Jadalynn that she could have many friends simultaneously.
“We really improved her ability to be friends with more than one friend,” Beebe said. “She has a large variety of friends now.”
Sitting at a table beside Jadalynn one recent Wednesday, 13-year-old Phoeboana LaMontagna, who also lives at Meadowbrook Apartments, carefully painted her doll’s lips red with bright nail polish.
“I tried to make it me, but then I died my hair black,” Phoeboana said, showing off her doll’s red hair. Beside her, Jadalynn trimmed the pink hair of a Nicki Manaj doll she was working on.
“Once, (Phoeboana) was going to change her last name to my last name because we thought that would make us sisters,” Jadalynn said. “We saved up for it and everything,”
Johnson has been putting on art workshops at Meadowbrook Apartments for decades. She and her husband, Jerry Ernest Johnson, lived there the 1990s. Children started coming over when they were barbecuing outside, she says.
“I started having the kids do some art, and then, afterward, I would feed them pizza, or ramen noodles or hot dogs,” she said. “We had our own community thing going on, and then we got organized through Community Action,” a nonprofit organization that supports area children and families.
Since then, the Johnsons have used grants for theme-based projects, including working with the chil dren to film an anti-smoking video at Northampton Community Television that featured a giant cigarette made by the kids.
Last year, Johnson says she received a cultural grant through the Northampton Arts Council for about $500 to pay for craft materials — like ribbon, pipe cleaners, cotton balls, and a 32-ounce bag of polyester fiberfill stuffing — and her time. The money ran out last fall, but Johnson says she continued holding weekly classes because her students didn’t want to stop.
During the hour-long workshops, Johnson first teaches her students how to make their doll’s head from papier-mache covered with artist’s concrete. Then the students paint their dolls and attach googly eyes and yarn for hair, and outline their mouths with nail polish. Johnson helps them sew together clothing for the dolls.
“The way we do clothes, the math doesn’t have to be right,” she said, holding up a crop-top shirt she was sewing for student’s puppet.
As part of the grant, the students’ puppets will be featured in a few local galleries this fall. In order to give them more immediate feedback on their work, Johnson recently organized a gallery showing at the Anchor House in Northampton. The opportunity, explained Beebe, taught her great-granddaughter “that you can display your art and it’s not just something that will be put on the refrigerator.”
The students carry that lesson and others with them throughout life, Johnson said.
“Some of the kids grew up, and they have kids now, and they say, ‘I still have my doll. I had some good times back then. Thank you for doing that, it brought light into my life.’ ”
Andy Castillo can be reached at acastillo@gazettenet.com.