Local High School Student Uses Her Love of Art to Transform a Conference Room into a Community Meeting Space

Amelia Silverman, a sophomore and honors student at Fox Lane High School, in Bedford, NY, is using her love to art to transform the conference room on the second floor of the Jefferson Valley Mall into a community meeting space where a portion of the artwork will be created by local residents.

Amelia created a design that she will be executing over the summer for the mall conference room to make it colorful, happy and to incorporate participation from the community through artwork. She will have a table at the Sunset Market event at the Jefferson Valley Mall (located at 650 Lee Blvd, Yorktown Heights, NY) on June 27^th beginning at 5:00 pm where she will have the word, “COMMUNITY” colorfully written out large in bubble letters and children and adults are invited to write their names inside of the large letters. Alexa O’Rourke, the manager of the mall, will have this community created art framed to become part of the design that Amelia is creating for the mall’s conference room.

Amelia also came up with the innovative idea to help raise money for an important local non-profit that supports youth in the Yorktown area, Alliance for Safe Kids. At the event on June 27^th, she will have local residents write their names for a small donation onto cut-out handprints that will be used to form the leaves of a gigantic tree she will be painting on the main wall in the room representing the Jefferson Valley Mall Hub and the deep roots it has in the community.

Ms. Silverman’s transformation of the meeting room will begin at the Sunset Market event and will be ongoing over the summer. Part of her design will include words such as “friendship,” “kindness” and “family” just to name a few of the themes that will be incorporated into the artwork to highlight these positive messages when the room is used by various groups, including children, throughout the year.

As Amelia says, “the goal of this art project is to inspire not only Yorktown area residents, but people from all around to connect with their communities to make a change. In order to bring a little color to your surroundings, one must take the action of asking the community to help.” 

In creating this concept of bringing community together through a participatory art project, Amelia worked with the manager of the mall, O’Rourke, and the marketing director, Heather Novak, and discussed how this public space could be transformed to reinforce the values within the community. Both O’Rourke and Novak immediately embraced the idea of using art to help citizens in the area engage with the meeting place that the mall has become and to further the feeling of community within the neighborhood.

The Alliance for Safe Kids (ASK) is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides a safety net for local youth and families in the Yorktown and surrounding area. Their mission is to promote awareness of youth mental health and prevention of substance use/ abuse and other destructive behaviors damaging to our youth. ASK is a collaboration within the community – parents, teens, educators, law enforcement, government, medical professionals, businesses, faith leaders, civic groups – aimed at providing youth with the information and skills needed to make healthy decisions while emphasizing the need for families to protect and nurture their children by getting informed and staying involved.