October 10, 2018

Dean Sudarsky ’16 is an innovative and experimental cartoonist. He is currently mentoring young artists at New Urban Arts (NUA), an after-school program in Providence, Rhode Island. The program focuses on getting urban high school students into mentoring relationships with trained artists. Together they engage in youth leadership, risk taking, collaboration, and self-directed learning.

How did you get involved with NUA?

NUA is well known in the Providence arts community—lots of people I know have mentored there at one time or another. It is also located next door to the coffee shop I work at, and the high school kids that go there frequently come in to hang out. (Part of the fun has been listening to the students debate which sandwich we serve is the best, etc.) I went to a student exhibition after work some time last year and was really amazed by the space and the energy. It’s an open layout with different stations for various art-making (there’s a fashion/sewing station, a music studio, a screen-printing station, lots of drawing/painting/print-making/zine supplies), and students are free to move between each space and are encouraged to be interdisciplinary in their approach. It’s also a safe place for them outside of school to just hang out and play games. It’s an incredible resource and while I’m a little envious of the students, I am mostly glad that I get to be a part of it.

What has been your favorite project to date with your NUA mentees?

Officially, I am there as a “study buddy,” and my job is to help students with their homework, college/job applications, essays and tests, but just as often I hang out and play games and draw. My favorite project so far has been a series of jam comics I have done with a rotating cast of students. It’s usually pretty slow-going at first, and only the students who are more confident in their art skills want to participate, but when the other kids see how silly and loose the stories are, it reaches critical mass pretty quickly. I think the embarrassment that the drawings are crude or unpolished fades as soon as the first one is done—it’s a little magical when a few doodles are folded into a pocket-sized booklet with a complete comic, and I think it’s really fun for them to be able to take home a real object that they didn’t expect to make. My favorite one, which will be on display in the midyear student exhibition, is about a kid who falls through the sky to land on a rounded mountain. Seconds later, another kid falls down nearby and says, “I know where we are. We’re on my dad’s forehead.” The last page is the dad with a few dots on his bald head looking flustered.

How can other people get involved or help support NUA?

I defer to NUA’s website, which has a tab labeled, “Get Involved.”

For those not in the Providence area, there’s also a donations section which breaks down where your money will go and how you can help out with non-monetary gifts.

How can other people help teens in their lives engage in the same sort of empowering skills?

At a mentor meeting, we recently looked at statistics that show how huge an impact adult relationships with students can make, specifically relationships between teenagers and adults that are not parents or teachers. We were encouraged to think back to who we trusted, who made us feel valuable and supported when we were in high school, and recalled what felt like the vast gulf between our world and the world of adults. Depending on a student’s situation at home and in school, there may not be an adult in their lives they feel they can trust or talk to. Libraries and after-school programs are excellent places to look, but any way you can get involved with a program that lets kids be themselves outside of their homes and schools is great. The other part of NUA’s mission is giving students access and exposure to the arts. If you personally know a kid, I would encourage you to take them to see something that they can see themselves in—a local show, a poetry slam, a small theater production, something besides a museum full of old paintings of nobility—or just sit down and make a drawing or a zine with them, share your favorite albums or make a little music together. It might take time to find the right entry point, but if the ever-increasing number of students that pour through NUA’s doors daily is any indication, they will get hooked.

Are you working on any personal projects you would like to share?

I have a couple of slow-moving projects going on that aren’t quite far along enough to share, but nothing for sale currently. I’ve done some short comics for friends’ anthologies and have been trying to do more personal projects for people I know—hand-drawn postcards, letters, portraits, etc.—which has been really helpful to get things going in the absence of external deadlines. I finished a minicomic for CAKE last summer called HYPERLYDIAN, most of which is available to read on my website. My goal in the next year is to get more self-contained short comics into print instead of just posting on Instagram (blastmastr).

Interview with Angela Boyle ′16.