Enter Stage Right: A Conversation with Serena Saunders

Serena Saunders also spent last summer working with members of the Guild, a paid apprenticeship that gives justice-impacted young people the opportunity to develop marketable job skills and reconnect with their community, run by Mural Arts’ Restorative Justice program. Together, Saunders and the Guild participants painted and installed Butterfly Lakes, located on the outer walls of FDR Park’s Community Clubhouse. The artwork was dedicated last October at the graduation of the Guild cohort that assisted Saunders.

With her uplifting work, Saunders hopes to inspire Philadelphia youth. “There are adults in this city very interested in curating spaces and opportunities for them to be their best selves,” says Saunders. “Art can be many things in this process, from a tool of self-expression and exploration to a full-time career. Wherever they may find themselves, we are here to help them to help themselves in growing these tools rather than its communication or creation. In short, they come first. As much as I love to create, the art is a wonderful by-product of the most rewarding component: working alongside them.”

Prevalent in Saunders’ work is a theme of undying hope in the face of adversity and injustice, and her work is heavily influenced by her compassion towards community, especially young people. These passions were developed during Saunders’ decade spent teaching art and poetry at more than a dozen schools and nonprofits in Philadelphia and neighboring states.

“My background in community arts has influenced how I see arts potential through its purpose,” says Saunders. “I am very interested in art as a tool of historical documentation. We can capture a present and speak to a future. In my community specifically, being a full-time practicing fine art painter was far from the norm or expected. Further from that was the expectation of seeing those who look like you and come from where you come, live on huge canvases, on huge walls, and in important buildings.”

A few years ago, Saunders began working with Mural Arts’ Restorative Justice department after taking a hiatus from working with youth programs to focus on her personal body of art.

“Those years of being embedded in the community under the guise of teaching art, but in reality trying to support the learning of life, was a position that didn’t end when you ‘clocked out,'” she muses. “Being a community artist/activist had morphed into more of a lifestyle than a job. It has been refreshing to reenter this work, with this program of older youth at this present time and have the privilege to support their futures.”

Saunders’ foremost lesson she has learned while creating art within a community is that it is always about the community first. This is what she enjoys most about working with community members to create work outside of her studio, where the work is the focus. For her, art becomes the tool to instill a growing relationship, whereas, in her studio practice, she is the tool creating the art. When collaborating with others, it is refreshing for her to see the artwork pour out of people and watch them transform.

Says Saunders: “It is projects like Enter Stage Right, for clients like the Kimmel Cultural Campus, that uses art to tap into the superpower it holds to beautifully tell a story, and then to pass artists such as myself the torch and stage to tell that story on that makes for a ‘pinch yourself moment. I am extremely grateful.”

Enter Stage Right will be dedicated at the Kimmel Center’s Merck Arts Education Center on Wednesday, June 29, 2022, from 3:30-4:30 pm.