Rockville Centre Youth Council seeks to educate through art

Artistic representations of dead celebrities like Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger and Jackson Pollack will appear throughout the village in the coming months, intended to evoke a sense of loss and unfulfilled potential. The mannequins, part of the Rockville Centre Youth Council’s “What Could Have Been…?” project, will be deployed to raise awareness of the often fatal results when young, talented celebrities get caught up in substance abuse.

For the past four months, amateur artists throughout the village have been creating torso representations of celebrities who died as a result of drug abuse, explained Beth Hammerman, the council’s chairwoman for the past three years.

Formed in 2009 with the goals of ensuring a safe, nurturing social community for local youth and preventing substance abuse, the Youth Council is open to all high school students and adults who live, work, volunteer or study in the Rockville Centre school district. Hammerman said that in the past, the council has attempted to reach students through a more traditional route, using guest speakers from organizations like Confide and Phoenix House. This year, however, Catherine Kildunne, a student who serves as the council’s membership and social outreach chairwoman, had a different idea.

“I realized that traditional approaches [to] preventing substance abuse, like lectures and posters, were not getting through to certain groups of youth out of South Side,” Kildunne said. “I thought it would make more sense to take a hands-on approach. Using art and famous figures is getting people involved with things they already have an emotional attachment to.”

The mannequin project is based in part on the Silent Witness National Initiative, which uses life-size silhouettes to tell stories of domestic violence. The project also drew inspiration from various locales that use artistic renderings, such as Cincinnati’s pigs or Nassau County’s horses.