The New Yorker:
Zina Hall used to be the first artist through Creative Growth’s studio doors each morning. She’d have the Oakland paratransit bus drop her by the nearby Whole Foods around eight. Then she’d walk down 24th Street to get a little exercise, passing condos, construction sites for more condos, and, on the sidewalks, fragrant lemon bottlebrush trees with scarlet flowers. Soon the center would rise in front of her: a squat, red brick building, formerly an auto-repair shop, with a stately vertical marquee that gives it the charm of an old movie house. Drawings and paintings crowd the plate-glass windows, clamoring for the attention of passersby; around the corner, hand-laid brick planters host a garden of succulents. Hall’s friend Charlotte Moses, one of Creative Growth’s client-care specialists, would sometimes let her in before the 8:30 open time. Hall, a textile artist, would help set out chairs at the long worktables; as soon as she could, she’d take her usual seat and immerse herself in work. A lover of Motown, she often had her headphones on; some of her embroideries feature Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and other lodestars. She’d pause only when necessary. “Just sew,” Hall told me recently. “That’s what I do. At break time, I usually sew during my break.”
Hall, who is fifty-six years old, with kind eyes and a gap-toothed grin, is a professional artist with a developmental disability. For fourteen years, Creative Growth, a nonprofit gallery and studio, has been a vital part of her life—a center of calm, a locus of community, an incubator of her talents. The studio’s twelve thousand square feet accommodate painting, drawing, woodwork, ceramics, textiles, and rug-making. In its capacious, open space, garland lights arc across the ceiling, over a ladder, a dress form, and high shelves laden with colorful supplies; the room, depending on where your eye alights, evokes a blue-chip gallery, a secret laboratory, or a garage sale. Since its founding, in 1974, Creative Growth has garnered a reputation for its amorphous methods of nurturing talent and for the calibre of its artists, some of whom—Judith Scott, Dan Miller, Donald Mitchell, and John Martin—have found international success. (Lawrence Rinder, who recently stepped down as the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, told the Times Magazine in 2015, “I was the dean of an art school for four years. If we had the same percentage of success, we’d be the best art school in all of history.”)
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