Art has always been a part of Carolyn Elaine’s life. She and her sister once ran a full service salon where she did nails, and she used to paint clothes during her collegiate days.
For years, she’s spent summers leading Oak Park’s Off the Wall art employment program where young adults become apprentices to Elaine, the program’s “master artist,” according to her title and to those in Oak Park who have worked with her.
After 21 years of leading the Off the Wall program and helping over 480 of the young creatives, Elaine, 64, has decided to step away from the program after installing the students’ final mural
“My spirit has been telling me it’s time to pull back and move on — 21 years is a long time,” she said. “I’ve gotten a lot out of the program. And of course, I have given a lot.”
This summer, Off the Wall artists worked on a mosaic mural on a building at 6209 North Ave. in Oak Park for what is set to be the home of Beyond Hunger, a relief program for those experiencing food distress.
The mosaic artwork, titled “Gathering Together,” is a five-panel depiction of the process of how food ends up at the dinner table. As a teacher, Elaine said she was proud of the students’ work.
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“They’re phenomenal, they do phenomenal work,” she said.
For eight to 10 weeks, artists aged 16-22 spend time with Elaine to enhance their skills and confidence. Elaine has taken this role since the program’s opening in 2005.
She taught those in the program the methods of mosaic application all the way through completing a public arts mural, something she said they don’t have much familiarity with. But after she shows them ways of how to work in the medium, she takes a step back and lets the art come to life.
“Once they learn how to use the tools, I just kind of step back and let them work their magic,” Elaine said. “A lot of them, they just blow my mind with what they do with a new medium.”
Each summer, people that have come through her program have done mosaic installations, a medium she’s most comfortable with.
After a study-abroad trip to Portugal over 20 years ago, Elaine developed a different appreciation for art.
“I decided to go back to school and get a second degree and while I was there we toured different studios because at that time, they were preparing for the World’s Fair,” she said. “I was introduced to mosaic, something I wasn’t familiar with at all, but I just fell in love with it, just by seeing it.”
When she got back home to the States, she volunteered in a mosaic project where her passion for the medium flourished. Elaine said the instructor of the program recognized that she had a gift, one she hadn’t picked up on herself.
“The minute I picked up those tools and she instructed me on how to do it, it just felt natural,” Elaine said.
Mosaic art has led Elaine and her pieces to travel the globe. She’s currently working on a project that is set to be installed in November in Sierra Leone.
Now that the time has come for her to venture into new areas in the art world, she still wants others to recognize and appreciate the mural her students have put into making Oak Park a more colorful place, and the medium overall.
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“The brokenness of it to me is just beauty,” she said. “Sometimes I’m not as focused on the pieces, but the cracks in between the pieces are just as beautiful. It’s almost like making something out of nothing. Of course that’s what art is, but to me it just represents life. It’s like pulling people together, pulling pieces together, pulling communities together. So whether I’m working with broken pieces, broken communities, broken people, there’s beauty in it.”