Classical High School student Mary Adewusi studies photography and screen printing at New Urban Arts.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE When Tyler Denmead leaves New Urban Arts, he won’t think about all of the money the organization raised or the awards it won or even the number of teenagers it served.

Instead, he will remember the personal stories of the teenagers he helped and the relationships, built slowly over time, between mentor and student, aspiring artist and aspiring young adult.

In particular, Denmead will remember the story of James, a Cambodian teenager who burst out of the Westminster storefront in a fury when his mentor wouldn’t drive him to a gang showdown. Five years later, the young man walked into the arts program and told Denmead, “I wouldn’t be alive without New Urban Arts.”

“What this says is that this place teaches kids to understand the value of meaningful relationships,” Denmead said during an interview yesterday. “That student decided, ‘This is a life worth living.’ ”

After 10 years of running a quirky, highly inventive after-school arts studio for Providence high school students, Denmead is moving on. In July, Denmead, his wife Katherine, and their baby daughter, Virginia, will move to England, where he will begin postgraduate studies in arts, culture and education at the University of Cambridge.

Embracing a career in the arts was the farthest thing from Denmead’s mind when he enrolled as a pre-med student in Brown University in the early 1990s. A run-in with a third grade teacher had scared him away from the arts. But Brown insisted that its students be well-rounded and so Denmead wound up spending a summer in France studying art history.

While he was there, he decided to get a job. It turns out that a French chef wanted someone to teach him English, so they traded skills. The chef wound up becoming his mentor, teaching him to see himself as a creative individual. When Denmead returned home, he began to write and draw, things he never would have attempted before his trip to France.

The experience with the French chef was so deeply satisfying that Denmead began to explore what it would take to create similar mentoring relationships between young artists and high school students.

New Urban Arts was born during his senior year, thanks to a $4,000 grant from the Swearer Center at Brown. Housed in a fourth-floor apartment in Grace Church, New Urban Arts began with 10 high school students and four artist mentors.

“I had no arts education background,” Denmead said. “I was as reliant on learning from them as they were from me.”

In the beginning, the group did a lot of collaborative art projects. Denmead’s favorite ice-breaker was the pass poem, a literary round robin in which one person writes the first stanza and then another person responds and so on.

“This is a way of creating shared ownership,” he said. “It minimizes the risk.”

New Urban Arts wasn’t afraid to be brash or bold. Students painted graffiti murals and giant self-portraits in an empty storefront in The Arcade. The program grew, thanks to a $20,000 grant from the Echoing Green Foundation, which provides seed capital to start-up non-profits. Meanwhile, Denmead was so busy that he barely went to class.

“I spent 80 percent of my time here,” he said. “I had no life my senior year.”

In 1988, New Urban Arts moved into its current location at 743 Westminster St., across from Classical High School. New Urban Arts chose this location because of its proximity to three high schools, Classical, Central and Textron Chamber of Commerce Academy, a charter school.

“The first four or five years were completely painful,” Denmead recalled. “There were moments when we couldn’t meet payroll. I used my personal credit cards to live off of. There was very little going on in the after-school movement back then. I had a tough time selling the idea” of an after-school arts program.

“But I was pretty arrogant,” he said. “I didn’t want to fail. I later realized that taking risks and risking failure was what was needed.”

Ten years later, New Urban Arts has grown from a scrappy start-up fueled by coffee and credit cards to a thriving after-school program with 150 students, 16 artist-mentors and an annual budget of $200,000. The Presidents Committee on Arts and the Humanities has recognized New Urban Arts as one of the best arts and youth development programs in the country for four consecutive years.

“I came out of college thinking that the world needed to be fixed and I was the fixer,” Denmead said.

Now he knows better. The students have fixed him in ways he never would have imagined. The experience, he said, has made him humble. And it has forced him to reflect on his own values as well as privileged childhood.

“I’m never going to have it this good again,” he said. “I get to have these wonderful, curious conversations. I get to watch students take risks and share their art in this communal space. I’ll miss that.”

Just the other day, a student asked, “What do white people want?”

There aren’t too many places where teenagers and adults can engage in a conversation about identity and class. That teenagers are willing to take on these kinds of questions is both brave and disarming.

The decision to leave New Urban Arts wasn’t made easily. Sometimes, Denmead wonders whether he is making the biggest mistake of his life, because he can’t imagine having a more inspirational job that the director of an after-school arts program.

“Three years ago, it became clear to me that part of the value of the creative process is that you’re constantly changing,” he said. “For me, it meant I couldn’t stay in the same place. The organization needed new risks, new challenges. I had to force myself to go.”

In honor of his legacy, the board of directors has established a Founders Fund, which will support continued excellence and innovation at New Urban Arts. Denmead, who is now 30, hopes that the “graduates” of New Urban Arts will become the next generation of mentors, if not here, then at after-school programs across the country.

Although he is moving on, Denmead hopes to become part of that legacy.

lborg@projo.com