Mokena resident Jennifer Hunter, 35, said her long-time dream to found an art center recently became a reality.
In 2015, Ephraim’s House Community Art Center, which is based in her home, became a “Christ-centered” non-profit organization with a mission to provide “programs that encourage expression, creating, and problem solving within a comprehensive visual arts setting” for all ages with a special focus on adaptive arts for individuals with disabilities, she said.
Hunter earned a bachelor’s degree in 2004 in art education and art studio and a master’s degree in 2012 in special education from Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights. For the last 13 years, she has been an art teacher in Palos Heights Dist. 128, teaching children in kindergarten through fifth grade.
Hunter said her desire to help those with special needs, especially children, grew partially out of her experiences as an art teacher and out of a fear that art will become an increasingly less important part of the public school curriculum.
Hunter’s view is that art is necessary to a balanced life.
“This is important,” Hunter said. “Our society is changing and shifting and it’s really in some ways trying to eliminate moments where you get to create something, when you get to experience something three dimensionally, and it’s not just the rigor of learning facts and making sure that you can compete with the next person. I really think that it’s important for people to just — rest.”
Hunter said she believes the creative moments are especially important for children with special needs who are often unable to communicate their feelings easily — or at all, and engaging in art allows those pressures to “fall away.”
More Top Picks Best Ink Tank Printers
“They’re creating,” Hunter said. “They’re left to kind of make their own choices, which they don’t get to do a lot of times. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to hang on to (creativity in the classroom.”
Although the classroom is a place she loves to be, Hunter said she knew she wanted to create an environment where she could “do what I love and… really intentionally provide an art experience …with people who feel like they’re screaming inside…and give them a way to express how they’re feeling or just do something for the sake of doing it.”
When Hunter was age 22, her own life journey left her “screaming inside” and unable to let anyone know how she was feeling, she said. Her father, Richard Hunter, died in 2002 of cancer within four months of his diagnosis. He was age 55. Devastated by the loss, Hunter said she found it difficult to move forward with her life or to share her feelings with her younger siblings or her mother who was disabled with multiple sclerosis.
Hunter said she was questioning her Christian faith and turning away from it at a time when she needed it most. But the birth of her children — Lorenz, 9, and Liberty, 7 — gradually helped her returned to her faith, with the help of her friend Emily Schissler, she said.
Schissler’s daughter Isobel was born in 2011 with spina bifida, a condition with various degrees of severity in which defects in the spinal cord and in the bones of the spine. The outpouring of love for Isobel and the entire Schissler family left Hunter wondering what she could do to help Isobel and other children with disabilities.
“Could art be used to help children like Isobel communicate?” asked Hunter, explaining why she opened the center.. “Would it bring them joy to paint? Could creativity be cultivated despite communication delays?”
Isobel and her sister Alexis, who was adopted by the Schissler family, became the first Ephraim House students, Hunter said. And although Isobel died unexpectedly in 2015, she has been an inspiration to Hunter in building her program.
“Life is just hard and people find themselves in situations that they could not have imagined and that’s where Ephraim’s House… is that piece of joy in your day, in your week, where you can kind of put aside those things that you are struggling with and be free of that …,” Hunter said. “The hope…is that it will be an experience…that will linger with you…that feeling of just kind of letting your burdens fall.”
Hunter is currently looking for a permanent classroom for art classes for individuals or groups.
For more information, visit www.ephraimshouse.org or call 708-926-5838.