Adrian Curry’s Art Leadership Center, at the Excited Stage

Above: Art Leadership Center’s Summer Camp Showcase 2018 [PHOTOS: COURTESY]

The Art Leadership Center (ALC) for children and young adults doesn’t need a website yet because it has a Facebook page; the website is en route.

Director Adrian Curry, 28, has been teaching step and dance for 15 years, out of the Weisser Park Youth Center.  The ALC is a program steeped in nontraditional schooling, with the art component representing the program’s public face.

The leadership half develops renaissance scholars and artists “with a global conscious that embody the five levels of leadership: well-read, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-traveled, and well-balanced,” Curry said.

Through a lecture- and lab-style curriculum, the ALC well-rounds the brain for the art, the same way a filmmaker might better their filmmaking by not just watching movies but deep-diving painting, photography, and every ancillary art form connected to it.

So when the art is introduced, the brain, sufficiently fed, can operate at its optimum, like an atom free to explode after its excited stage, Curry said.

The artistic side, exercised through the singing, rapping, poetry, spoken word, drum percussions, and step routines, just printed their t-shirts.  “We don’t have boots, we don’t have instructors,” said ALC Director Adrian Curry, who is also all of the instructors: spoken word, choir, drum, and step.

“If you want to build a body, you have to build it properly,” Curry said, who first “attacks” the brain.

Curry is a graduate of Morehouse College, where he stepped on a multi-award winning step team.  His background is in neural science and psychology, and he was recently accepted into medical school.

Until this year, the ALC has only existed as an idea, something percolating in Curry’s head.  Omnipresent in the community for years, Curry’s body of work sold his program without traditional advertising.  Curry has led steppers at Juneteenth celebrations and Harambe Festivals, won the 3 Rivers Festival Parade through Fort Wayne Community Schools; his group stepped with Mayor Henry with the Sparks Foundation. 

In its current form, officially under the Art Leadership Center banner, his student count of 15 grew to 35 by Summer 2018.  Those numbers are coming in handy.

On August 2, the ALC invited the community to their put on their carnival and bonfire event at the Saint Henry Community Center, at Paulding and Hessen Cassel, the location of the large, community garden where the ALC also has a gardening program.  The ALC develops leaders; its foundation is service.

On September 30, Curry and his steppers will put on a showcase event called “Donations and Nominations,” to accept contributions for the program but also to help Adrian Curry be nominated for the Arts United Emerging Leader Award.  “Maybe we can get some boots out of it,” Curry said, of the attention that would come from a nomination.

To donate to the Art Learning Center, contact Adrian Curry at 260.206.8437 or through email theartleadership13@gmail.com.

Below: ALC’s Summer Camp Garden Program 2018