Abby Hoover
Managing Editor

Art as Mentorship hosted a health and education summit at Revólucion Educativa on August 2, followed by a special announcement about its annual event, the Celebrate Ameri’Kana Music & Arts Festival.

The Whole Artist Summit brought together regional thought leaders in education, mental health, and music education for a keynote presentation and panel discussion on trauma-informed music education. It was followed by a networking Happy Hour for attendees and presenters at PH Coffee.

The event also marked the launch of The Whole Artist Task Force, a group of therapists working with Art as Mentorship and local schools with Rebel Song Academy (RSA) satellite programs to formalize a process of identifying at-risk students and connecting them with a network of resources within the community, providing continuity of care within and beyond RSA.

The Whole Artist Task Force includes Sheri Jacobs, founder of Heartland Art Therapy, past president of the Kansas Art Therapy Association, and TEDx Overland Park founder; Monica Phinney, registered drama therapist and founder of Heartworks Studio; Carol Fisher, Associate Professor of the KU Practice in Music Therapy, past president of the Midwestern Region of the American Music Therapy Association, and Continuing Education Director of the Black Music Therapy Network, Inc.; Tyler Mark, Neurofeedback Technician; and Laura Blankenship, B.A., Music Therapy, Music Educator at Base Academy of Music and singer-songwriter.

More than a decade ago, what is now Art as Mentorship, led by the band Making Movies, started as a music camp at the Mattie Rhodes Center in Northeast Kansas City.

At the time, they asked parents and students how to make the camp more exciting. The answer? Take this show on the road. They began hosting Making Movies Carnaval at Knuckleheads, building their first community event.

“That community event served as a way for the youth to perform, as a way to collaborate with other partners and to raise money once we decided to make it a nonprofit, because the families around the program kept asking for more,” Art as Mentorship Founder and Making Movies frontman Enrique Chi said. “We asked Frank, ‘Yo, can you give us a crazy good deal?’ And he did. He basically gifted us Knuckleheads for two years for us to raise money.

Now, under the name Art as Mentorship, the program continues to grow rapidly. Post-pandemic, they wanted to rebrand the festival on the idea of celebrating Americana music, art and culture.

“It should be more representative of what the United States actually looks like,” Chi said. “We’re just this super diverse community of folks, and we dabbled with putting it at the Crossroads. We invited families from this neighborhood down – even that is a stretch to get families who are really just getting comfortable being in the United States to go anywhere else – so we came to the conclusion that the best thing we could do for the festival is to make it totally free and bring it to the park, Concourse Park.”

This year’s festival will be on September 10 from 1-8 p.m. at Concourse Park, which is a full circle moment for Chi. It’s one of the parks where they would take the kids at the Mattie Rhodes Center 11 years ago when the music camp was happening. The nonprofit is even based out of the historic St. Francis building at the southwest corner of the park.

There will be performances by founding band Making Movies, Grammy winning artists Texmaniacs, Dos Santos, Talibah Safiya, Parranderos Latin Combo, the Northeast-based Salvation Choir, recent “The Voice” contestant Kate Constantino, students from The Rebel Song Academy, and many more.

However, the biggest announcement of the day is the innovative new way that Art as Mentorship will be tracking the transformative change that they see in young artists, which they’ve only recorded anecdotally until now.

“We’ve seen kids change,” Chi said. “We’ve had families and parents say, ‘My young person has been radically changed with this.’ We started to want to quantify that because I started realizing that the United States isn’t so great about funding arts and isn’t so great about funding diverse communities and things like that.”

Tyler Mark, Neurofeedback Technician and current Master’s in Applied Neuroscience candidate at King’s College, and a member of the Whole Artist Task Force, performed electroencephalogram (EEG) scans on five kids’ brains – with approval from them and their parents – before and after participating in the program, and it showed signs of physiological change in young people.

“That audacity that we had to be kind of knucklehead, punk rock, Latino, whatever the hell we are, and also trying to scan kids’ brains to prove how music affects it, attracted a national initiative called One Nation One Project and they’re funded by the World Health Organization, they’re funded by the National League of Cities, and they’re investing real dollars into communities and and also pulling out data and research to keep proving this point,” Chi said. “Music is a part of our wellness as a society, therefore, we should fund it with that in mind.”

Along with 17 other cities hosting festivals, next year Kansas City is participating with the Celebrate Ameri’Kana festival in July.

“[We’re] collecting data that we can all – as a community of music, musicians, artists, music educators – we can leverage that data to prove this point to funders into our own cities, ‘Hey, music is really important to us and in looking at this data, it actually makes our city better.’”

Base Academy of Music, a non-profit music organization that makes starting to learn a musical instrument accessible and affordable for urban youth, was founded by Clint Velazquez, who was inspired by Making Movies’ work in Northeast nearly a decade ago.

As a music educator, he was shocked at the deep, emotional level at which his students connected to him.

“When you teach music, that’s what happens,” Velazquez said. “You’re speaking the language of their soul, you’re reaching them in ways that you never even intended to as musicians and music teachers. That just made me so aware of just the kind of responsibility I had as a music teacher.”

Base Academy has plans to teach 175 lessons every week to youth this fall.

“We think that music education just makes a huge difference in people’s lives,” Velazquez said. “It gives them a reason and a means to succeed. We make music accessible and affordable because I think starting to play an instrument is one of the hardest things when you don’t know anything.”

Parents come to them asking for the gift of music because they know that it improves cognitive development and gives the most executive function development of any activity, proven by research.

Kyla Pitts-Zevin, Executive Director at the Northeast Community Center, which is home to Harmony Project KC, said that the organization has 100 kids on the waitlist.

“The next generation is compelling us to do this,” Pitts-Zevin said. “They’re expecting us to do this. Just like they have shared about everything that we know from cognitive research of what music does for the brain, we have seniors graduating this year. Six of those eight seniors are going to college tuition free – completely free – and six of the eight of them are first opportunity college students.”

Harmony Project KC needs help and investment to serve all of the youth in this community and beyond who want to participate. The organization is located at the Northeast Community Center, which was started 80 years ago by Italian immigrants.

“Our mission remains the same: to serve the community here in the historic Northeast. It’s just who those immigrants are looks different than it did 80 years ago. So I invite you all to come down and hang out just like our friends from Art as Mentorship did. This is such an exciting opportunity for us to collaborate more together.”

Phyllis Hernandez, longtime Northeast resident and founder of Sala de Arte, an art gallery at 9th Street and Van Brunt Boulevard that supports Latino artists, is the parent of an Art as Mentorship student. She has seen her daughter Izzy Rose blossom into a young woman who expresses her emotions through her songwriting and performing.

“She just loves it, like a child from Northeast had the opportunity to play at The Kauffman [Center for Performing Arts], the Folly Theater, all these amazing venues,” Hernandez said. “It’s not spoken and unheard of, until we’ve had this opportunity to work with Art as Mentorship. We are forever grateful.”

The future is bright for music in this country if they can wrap their heads around how profound it is for everyone, not just anecdotally, but even scientifically, Chi said.

Art as Mentorship’s goal is to raise $500,000 over the next two years through its Making Noise campaign to support their ongoing work with young artists, which is proven both anecdotally and scientifically right here in the community where they started.

The 2023 Celebrate Ameri’Kana Music & Arts Festival will be on Sept. 10 1-8 p.m. at Concourse Park in Northeast Kansas City. For more information, visit amerikana.tv/celebrate-amerikana-festival.