Lindsay Brinton awarded for her role in connecting youth with arts
By Kyle Carrozza, Staff Writer, The Times
Lindsay Brinton (left) accepts her Unsung Hero Award from presenter Regina Horton-Lewis (right).
COATESVILLE – Lindsay Brinton, founder of Art Partners Studio, was awarded the Unsung Heroes Award at Saturday’s Brandywine Health Foundation block party.
Brinton, who founded the nonprofit in the late 1990s and retired in February, was given the award for her contributions to the city.
During her acceptance speech, Brinton told residents to make sure art has a continued presence in the community.
“You are the artists; you are the art makers,” she said. “Keep on building art in the community, follow your muse, and don’t ever let art got away from Coatesville.”
Brinton believes that art is a way for individuals to interact with their surroundings and express themselves in a way not afforded by other media. Because of this, art is essential in shaping the culture of a place. To facilitate art’s importance, Art Partners started offering free classes to teenagers. When that took off, they expanded the classes to all youth.
“This was something you can’t do in a high school setting because there are certain standards that you have to come up to,” Brinton said in an interview. “It gave a lot of kids the chance to flex their creativity.”
Projects have included the Community Center mural and the Darkness to Light mural created with the Bridge Academy. She would like to see programs eventually expanded to offering opportunities for young people to take trips to art museums and meet artists.
In addition to entertaining the youth and giving them a place to develop skills, Brinton would like to see art influence the city’s redevelopment efforts. Ideally, she would like to see murals become an essential part of downtown’s aesthetics and art organizations to play an essential role in the economy. While such ambition may not be financially viable yet, she believes that Coatesville can become an important part of Chester County’s art scene.
“My dream is that the arts would be the anchor on main street,” she Brinton. “What an arts center could do is not only serve the residents, but it would bring people to the city.”
She believes that turning the city into a center for arts would bring people from the surrounding suburbs into the city; bringing these people in would have positive financial and cultural implications for the greater Coatesville area.
“Projects like that allow for people to cross borders, intellectually, artistically, and from the diverse population” she said.
Brinton pointed to the Community Center’s mural as an example of positivity stemming from the arts. In the year and a half process, residents selected the artist, helped design the piece, and even contributed to the painting. People were so enthusiastic about the result that when someone put graffiti on it, she got numerous phone calls from people around the city showing concern.
“People remember that. They really remember it,” she said.
