Editor’s Note: Students in an advanced feature writing class at Brown University were assigned to write a feature story about a street that conveys a sense of place. The project, in its eighth year, presents aspects of city life from the perspective of college journalism students.

PROVIDENCE — Gina Elaine Maycock is frustrated. The 19-year-old Providence high school senior has drawn a cat that looks ready to leap out of a window. But the stool on which the feline sits looks as flat as a cardboard box on recycling day.

Sunlight from New Urban Arts’ glass displays illuminates Maycock’s blond hair, black Guns ’N Roses T-shirt and glum expression. Like the other kids drawing, writing and painting around the 2,300 square-foot studio, Maycock has found an outlet to express herself at New Urban Arts.

Maycock says she has suffered from depression on and off for several years and that art has become one of her coping skills. Like a fast-acting inhaler to someone with asthma, she finds solace drawing anything from a pretty cat to a fierce griffin.

Maycock says her teachers recommended she attend New Urban Arts after school about a year ago. Twice a week at 2:30 p.m. Maycock would board a white van that she and her friends jokingly call “the hoopty” because of its age and decrepit interior. By 3 p.m. she would reach New Urban Arts and stay until 5 p.m. when “the hoopty” would pick her up.

Through her work at New Urban Arts, Maycock has been able to make new friends and become less introverted, she says. “I like the fact that people are there and they can just admire your work,” she says. “It feels good when you do something and everyone loves it. It feels good to get out feelings and expression onto the paper.

“There’s people to help you if you need a helping hand. [The artist mentors are] inspirational and they also get inspired by you.”

As Maycock found, New Urban Arts’ mission is to build a community that helps students cultivate their creativity through relationships with artist mentors. There are no grade books or curricula. No boundaries separate poets from musicians, photographers from painters or silk screeners from potters.

“So much of what happens here is very intangible,” says Tyler Denmead, 29, who founded the after-school arts-mentoring program nearly nine years ago while he was a senior at Brown University. “People talk about the relationships, the feeling, the vibe and less about participating in a class.”

Services and supplies are offered to the students free of charge. There is an application to join the program. But all students are accepted and the application is used as more of an administrative tool. “There is a widely held view that some of us can be artists and the rest of us can watch,” Denmead says. “I don’t believe that. I think creating art can and should be a meaningful part of everyone’s existence.”

Located at Dean and Westminster streets opposite Central and Classical high schools, New Urban Arts has 125 young artists enrolled and 14 artist mentors who are volunteers. Several are undergraduate students from local colleges.

The studio and makeshift offices are open all day to the full-time staff, mentors and the occasional artist-in-residence. Mentors and staff stay until the last student leaves, sometimes as late as 8 p.m. Mentors even come in on the weekends to hold workshops and help students with projects they have initiated.

Many of the students come from Classical and Central. But almost every high school in Providence is or has been represented at New Urban Arts.

Mary Adewusi, 16, a junior at Classical, has found a home at New Urban Arts when she is not running track. “We all have our own talents and here they can shine,” Adewusi says. “If you like making music, we’ve got something for you. If you like making pots, we’ve got something for you. Poetry, essays, we’ve got something for you. And if we don’t have it, we’ll try to incorporate it.”

Adewusi says she never realized how much training and time a mentor devotes to construct relationships with students until she became a mentor through another arts program called Afterzone. Some students from New Urban Arts, including Adewusi, go to a local YMCA to hold art workshops for younger students.

“Take your time,” Kedrin Frias, 24, tells Maycock as he tries to guide her over the din of students and a stereo that blasts everything from Rachmaninoff to reggae. Frias shows her how to use her whole arm to draw instead of just her wrist as another mentor brings a stool over so Maycock has a model for her drawing.

While they hold workshops, mentors often serve less as lecturers and more as collaborators who provide feedback and guide students through obstacles in their artwork.

Mentors also assist with other programs indirectly related to art. Through relationships with other groups such as College Visions, a group that guides low-income high school students through the college application process, New Urban Arts also helps guide each student’s personal development outside the studio.

Frias, who also helps students prepare art portfolios for college applications, says that through New Urban Arts and College Visions, students can create new opportunities out of their high school experience. “I think in high schools, especially those across the way, you are corralled into a category of students that dictates your options for the future,” says Frias. “Which is college or not. Career training or not. Part-time job or not. If you don’t even fit into any of those options, you’ve got to make do on your own.”

Frias attended the program while he went to Central High School and is now a substitute art teacher for the Paul Cuffee School. The Rhode Island College graduate believes that New Urban Arts changed his outlook and considers it a privilege to serve as a drawing mentor now. “New Urban Arts was the first group of people that said I didn’t have to conform to what my school told me and that even though I was only a student I could change things or at least choose my own path,” Frias says.

New Urban Arts opened in September 1997 to 10 students in a small space above Grace Church on Mathewson Street. Denmead began the nonprofit when he was a 21-year-old senior at Brown, with the help of five students from Brown and Rhode Island College of Design and a $4,000 Royce Fellowship from Brown’s Swearer Center for Community Service.

He’d never planned on a career in the arts. Denmead was a pre-med student at Brown whose only exposure to art came through a couple of art history classes.

“I had a third grade art teacher that told my parents that my artwork wasn’t worthwhile at a parent-teacher conference,” Denmead said. “I just didn’t participate in art class after that.”

But two things convinced him to alter his plan for his life: his experience tutoring a student at Gilbert Stuart Middle School and a summer in 1996 as an apprentice to French seafood chef Emmanuel Courtault. In exchange for having an American to practice his English with, the master chef known for his elaborate dishes taught Denmead how to make edible art.

In his junior year, Denmead dropped out of pre-med and undertook an independent study through Brown’s education department. The following year, NUA opened.

In 1998, Denmead graduated from Brown and won a four-year, $60,000 grant from the Echoing Green Foundation, a philanthropic organization in New York that provides money for projects that create social change. New Urban Arts moved to its current location at 743 Westminster St. that same year and expanded to adjacent studio space in 2000.

Since its inception, New Urban Arts has become a nationally recognized organization. Peter Hocking, the former director of the Swearer Center, says Denmead has been “very smart not growing the program beyond its capacity. The kids at New Urban Arts have a really good experience,” Hocking said. “And if it were to double or triple in size, I’m not sure that that would be possible.”

The once fledgling group operates on an average annual budget of $175,000. The program receives $15,000 from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, more than $6,000 from the City of Providence, $80,000 from foundations and $10,000 through the sale of artwork and merchandise. Its annual fundraising campaign exceeded its goal of $70,000. Denmead now serves as executive director of New Urban Arts, coordinating with the program’s 17-member board and developing mentors and staff who oversee most of the day-to-day operations.

He carefully investigates development possibilities for the program, such as moving into a larger space, and spends much of his time seeking more money to keep his brainchild running and growing.