Mentor Groupin'

MENTOR GROUPS! This is a new thing we've been doing. The goals of creating mentor groups are several. We work with the same group of four for twelve weeks. It provides more one on one time with an educator based off of our needs. Mentor groups also serve as building a stronger community within a small group. Different educators work on different things (for twelve weeks) such as working on a project, hosting an event, and possibly interviewing our neighbors about things from helping homeless people to getting the community involved with Zeum.

I'm in a group with Carlos, Jule, Samantha, Irina, and myself, Paul. We are currently working on an event called "Best Of". The art from Best Of is basically from when visitors come in and make awesome movies... we highly encourage them to fill out a media release from to have their movie showcased.

All four of us have different jobs. Carlos's job is to call different restaurants to ask for food donations for the event we're hosting. But, we all took turns calling because there were four restaurants to call. My job is to fundraise. I am basically looking for potential donors to donate money for us to rent the Zeum Theater. Fund raising is a new thing for me. One thing I've learned from my mentor group about fund raising is to be calm and polite. I had to call Buca Di Beppo for possible food donation and I was calm, polite and nervous. Usually my nervousness take over but this time it didn't. I remember calling a customer to remind them to stop by for your interview , and my friends were next to me and they were cranking out jokes and I accidentally drooled and I stopped talking in a middle of a sentence. But then I told her that there was static problem. Sorry. Samantha's job is the food entertainer as well as keeping and making sure everything is running smoothly. Jule's job is to advertise this event. Together we made flyer's saying we're having a Best Of showcase for Jule to put around Zeum. Irina's job is similar to Samantha's job except she is making sure we're doing what we need to.

One thing I like about mentor groups in general is that we really get to know who we work with and what each other needs are. I think that schools, after school programs and senior outreach programs should all have a mentor group because that is the only way to get to know who you're working with as suppose to working with 30 people at once. And the fact that after twelve weeks we show what we've done is totally awesome. When the first 12 weeks is over we will switch mentor groups and learn more new exciting things. And I will definitely look back at the time I spent with my group and acknowledge what we've successfully done.

Graffiti is Art

My name is Carlos Monroy, i'm 16 years old and im a ZeumMaster. I have been part of the Zeum crew for 5 months and it's been a very good experience so far.

Zeum has so many things to introduce a young person to. It is a great place to work and to be in and as a worker it has given me many ideas and one of the ideas that I want to talk about is graffiti. Graffiti is not just vandalism. It is also art. Art that people misunderstand and don't know the differences between them. People do many things to express themselves such as write poems, play an instrument, act, play games, and many young adults such as myself do graffiti. There's different kinds of graffiti; There's tagging, trow ups, pieces, wild style, and murals.

What you see around the city is tagging and tagging is just a name that writers get and their object is to be around the city, so that every other tagger knows them. Trow ups are a small graff that you make with cans and it doesn't take long to make - it's easy to do.

Pieces are around cities - you can sometimes see them on store walls and other places. They use more colors and are more organized, they take time to do.

Then there's wild style letters that stands out and many people can't read it... but its very cool... it takes practice to do and many people enjoy looking at them and trying to figure out what they say.

Last form of graff writing is murals, the best of the best it takes a lot of practice and a lot of time to be perfect.



All these kinds of graffiti can be amazing, but few people enjoy this others hate it and don't want to see it. They just think that people who do drugs, and high school drop out do it. They are wrong we are not drug users and most of us are doing very well in high school. There's also people who feel offended and think that the city looks dirty, that is a crime but expressing yourself is not a crime.

My idea that I am bringing to Zeum is to let Zeum and everyone that attends Zeum is to let the art of graffiti stay alive and encourage many young artist who are afraid of going to jail for expressing themselves. With the project BRINGING ART by DARK will make the wall outside in main gallery look better and not just a simple wall. This project will be conducted by a street artist and his friends and it will be soon to come.
"paint the town in many colors and name it art."