Celebrating Jennifer La Civita's Creative Legacy

It's Saturday, and in the basement of a former church in northwest Chicago, the knitting group has gathered on comfy counches, while around the corner in another room, Czech youth nibbles on Eastern European goodies and learn about art and culture in their parent's homeland, the Czech Republic. Upstairs, singing toddlers are developing an appreciation for rhythm and music in their Kindermusik class. Down the hall, a group of adults learns yoga, tai chi and meditation techniques, in a room where the walls are adorned with the work of local school children from one of the afer school arts programs. Welcome to the Portage Park Center for the Arts, the brain--and heart!--child of Jennifer La Civita.

For the past ten years, the Portage Park Center for the Arts has been the epicenter of art and culture in this ethnically diverse neighborhood in northwest Chicago. When I was living in Chicago, I was fortunate enough to experience the energy and magic of the Portage Park Center for the Arts firsthand. Jennifer didn't just found and run an art program; she has maintained, despite tenuous funding and long hours of work, a community arts and wellness center offering over sixty programs, including affordable arts classes for financially challenged children and the elderly, yoga--in Polish!--and a "home" for groups as diverse as a monthly folk dance gathering, a hand spinning group, and a "salon" for aspiring artists to share their work for critique. Jennifer helped home schoolers network and have access to arts education opportunities, hosted programs for immigrants to share and maintain their culture through the arts, and brought people of diverse ages, interests and backgrounds together to create and celebrate their lives. The center was a place where creative people could live their dreams, either by developing, or partaking in, innovative arts programming.

Typical of the center's offerings was a recent concert featuring Snatum Kaur and the "Celebrate Peace Band" that brought together people from a variety of ethnic communities and backgrounds that don't normally interact with one another. "The arts provide a venue to expand people's worlds," Jennifer explains, "and people meet and begin conversations here that wouldn't have happened in any other manner."

Jennifer has enjoyed providing Chicago with a supportive resource site that has promoted and celebrated the arts these past ten years. Knowing the huge impact the center has made on the lives of so many has given Jennifer a real sense of pride and accomplishment. A mother of two teenagers, Jennifer has a master's degree in counseling psychology and art therapy, and will be obtaining her doctorate in clincal psychology fromt he Adler School of Professional Psychology in the spring of 2009. She has decided to head in a new direction and start her own psychotherapy practice, incorporating the arts into her practice. We wish her well, and will be checking in on her from time to time.