STATE OF MIND : Healing Arts

Hope is a powerful thing. It can take the dark, primal scream of an abused child and turn it to pure relief and joy--exactly the vibe found splashed all over a recent creative-arts “Free Arts Day” at the Hillsides Home for Children in Pasadena.

Free Arts for Abused Children, a West Los Angeles-based nonprofit group, sponsors the annual event. Group leaders believe that the creative arts--dance, drama, music, writing, painting, sculpture, photography--are potent tools through which traumatized children can express their pain.

“What the kids get is relief from the despair, fear and humiliation embedded in their past,” explains Barbara Lashenick, executive director of Free Arts, which started in 1977. “And they learn they can get it out in an environment cushioned with support and praise--and that the result can be beautiful and not so scary.”

The only program of its kind in California, Free Arts works with 1,500 children weekly at 75 Southern California residential treatment centers, where youths ranging from tiny toddlers to toughened teen-agers live in protective custody of the courts. More than 700 volunteers--150 who work on a weekly basis with the kids--try to give these youngsters a sense of self-worth.

“These people were the only people in my youth who told me I was good at something,” says Oleta Brown, 23, a veteran of both the Free Arts program and a collapsed childhood soaked in abuse, alcohol, drugs, violence and jail time. “That I could achieve something, I could create something rather than just self-destruct and destroy everything around me. Of all the groups in L.A. working with disturbed children--and believe me, I was thrown in them all--Free Arts is the one with the most lasting, deepest curative effect.”

If you arrive at a Free Arts Day in full swing, you’ll glimpse a cache of emotionally wounded children gripping their creations excitedly, as if holding fistfuls of diamonds and gold.

“Most of these kids think of themselves in only stark, negative terms: stupid, flawed, bad--internally they’ll have a whole litany,” says John Hitchcock, director of Hillsides. “This day is often a new feeling for these kids of being successful at something other than anger.”

One teen-ager makes two parallel artworks: one of a satanic Zen garden filled with demons, evil, rage and lava, and another braided with a mammoth cornflower-blue peace symbol peppered in fragile handpicked, citrus-colored jasmine flowers. “Both pictures came from me,” he says. “I guess that’s the lesson. It’s all inside of me wanting to come out.”

An 8-year-old boy dashes up with his copper-and-gold mask. “I look like a soldier. A warrior. Don’t you think?” he asks. “Peaceful, though. And strong. I don’t have to spear people when I wear this mask. They’ll get the message.”