Shatter2Matter

Our plan

Before she ran a program of her own, painter and art therapist Cynthia Schildhauer spent a good deal of time working with the Community Collaborative for Youth -- a Chico, CA organization that sponsors non-traditional youth programming. It was at the CCY that she discovered the power of art in improving the lives of students. Soon Schildhauer wanted to run her own program, but she didn't know exactly what she wanted it to be. Then one night an idea appeared out of nowhere. She was chatting with a fellow art therapist, talking about what her life had been like when she'd lived in Santa Cruz. For some reason, Schildhauer's mind began to recall minute details of her everyday life in the seaside town — in particular, details about the recycling center near her house. She remembered the three giant bins in which the center stored their green, brown and clear glass, and she remembered tossing her own used bottles towards each of the bins, the satisfaction the sound of shattering glass would give her. Suddenly, she had the idea for her own youth program. She would gather a bunch of junk together, bring in a set of students, have the kids break all of the junk into pieces, then take the fragments and piece them back together, creating new forms from the old trash. It was a perfect program for Schildhauer, the right mix of artistic creation and emotional therapy. The idea for Shatter2Matter came out of nowhere. But Schildhauer knew that funding wouldn't be quite as easy. So she turned to her old partners at the Community Collaborative for Youth, and with their support, applied for $6000 of funding from the Chico City Arts Program. She got the funding, and the wheels started turning. With the help of the CCY, Schildhauer didn't have to do as much of the bureaucratic paperwork — she just had to focus on the actual programming.

What we did

With the new funding, Schildhauer and a group of two other artists — a sculptor and a mixed media artist — got to work on recruiting students. They ended up with 16 eager participants between the ages of 13 and 20. With Shatter2Matter's pilot program ready to go, there was only one thing left to do: secure the materials that the students would break down and reconstruct. That was accomplished on a whirlwind tour of local thrift-stores, where Schildhauer and her team loaded up her car full of coat racks, dishes, chairs, old wallpaper, foam pads, ceiling and floor tiles and more. To some people, this stuff was junk, but to the Shatter2Matter program, it was gold. The program began two to three weeks after the thrift-store runs, as Schildhauer led the 16 students through three days of intensely introspective journal-writing. Each student was responsible for writing 10 things that they didn't like about their current selves, and 10 things that they did. During those beginning days, Schildhauer was surprised to find that many students couldn't name anything they liked about themselves. After the journaling, it was time to get down to the fun part. All the thrift-store materials were piled in an empty parking lot, and students chose the pieces they wanted to feature in their artwork, then broke each and every one of them into tiny fragments. With the help of the Shatter2Matter adult artists, the students took the pieces and crafted six chairs out of broken materials. It showed the students how to create something beautiful out of the aspects of themselves that they didn't like, and it encouraged them to find an artistic outlet for their problems.