Inner-city teens paid to create a mural

Seventeen-year-old Wayne Hernberg lies sprawled across the Edmonton Art Gallery floor, piecing together a bunch of coloured photocopies.

"It's like my life is so puzzled right now and I'm trying to put the pieces together through art," he says, taping a picture of his head by his grey Next Generation shirt. "I guess you could say it's part of my healing process."

Wayne is one of 10 amateur artists scribbling, painting and snapping photos in an art program for inner-city teens.

He found out about it through the Youth Emergency Shelter, where he lived briefly to escape an abusive past.

They will produce a three-by-nine metre outdoor mural featuring self-portraits of the artists standing side-by-side. It will hang outside the Grounds for Coffee and Antiques store at 102A Avenue and 97th Street.

"Who do we see in larger-than-life standing portraits," asks workshop leader Kim McLain. "Nobility ... royalty ... When you have these kids in the same form, enlarged, looming, right in the heart of the inner city, it makes a statement."

McLain, an aboriginal artist, knows a thing or two about life in Edmonton's inner-city. He grew up there.

That's one reason program co-ordinator Heidi Alther chose him. She wanted a teacher with a past the kids could relate to. She also wanted someone with aboriginal roots, since most who sign up are native.

But McLain avoids focusing on these labels because he's trying to convince his students they have control over their identity.

Alther says the course is both a booster shot of self-esteem and a learning opportunity the troubled teens may not have had otherwise.

In fact, none of them have ever taken an art class outside of school.

"I thought it would be like, 'OK, sit down, here's a piece of paper, draw that,' " says 17-year-old Savone Jones. "But it's nothing like that. Kim's showing us how we can like use our own experiences in art."

Savone ran away from home and dropped out of high school in the ninth grade when she fell hard for a boy. They spent many nights wandering the streets wondering where they'd sleep. They drank a lot and took drugs.

Today Savone is back in school, doing upgrading at the Boyle Street Education Centre. For her, the art course is a way of building up a battered self-confidence.

Stephan Lea has higher hopes.

"If things go good here, maybe I can make a name for myself as an artist," says the 18-year-old sculptor who once sold a Plasticine animal for $135. "The money doesn't hurt either."

He's talking about the $300 each student gets for completing the course.

Alther says the cash-for-creation honorarium is an incentive. "Besides, they're making art and deserve to be paid like any other artist would."

The mural will be unveiled July 3. But the thought of their bodies plastered on a major street corner has some a little sheepish.

"At first I was like, 'Oh my God, everyone's gonna see me;' but later I was like 'Hey, that's kind of cool,' " says Savone.

"I've never won anything before. I've never had any pictures of me up at school or anywhere else, so it's special that I'll have this big bulletin of me up where the whole city can see."