

Top: Victoria (Vicki) Kirkland, Counselor for the Yellow Group. Bottom: Yellow group participants. Magda Lena Griffel Photos.
Stars, swirls and polka dots cover the walls of the Neighborhood Music School (NMS) this summer. On slips of paper taped to the walls, kids’ names are carefully spelled out in block letters, surrounded by patterns. Each label reflects their own artistic personalities. Every color of the rainbow is up here.
Welcome to Audubon Arts, a six-week summer arts program devoted to encouraging self-expression and creativity among its young participants. Every weekday, kindergarten through high school students come to NMS’ Audubon Street campus to do visual art, dance, music, and drama. To celebrate its 40th year, the program is mounting The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee for high school participants, and fully devised musicals for the younger students.
Every student is fully involved in their group's production, from designing the set and costumes, to writing the story itself. Here, the arts are interdisciplinary.
“The kids are heard, they’re seen, their ideas are incorporated into everything they’re doing. They have a sense of ownership.” said Anne Tubis, director of the program.


Fifth graders in the “yellow” group—groups at Audubon Arts are named after colors of the rainbow—feel the same. “We combine our ideas to make it better,” said one student, who chose not to give her name, on a recent Friday. “It’s a group that just helps each other.”
Together, the yellow group is working on a production around the theme of the storybooks. After students come up with a concept, the drama teachers write a script, and the music teachers adapt lyrics to contemporary songs for the participants to perform.
Nina, a yellow group member, said Audubon Arts feels more fun and more creative than school. She mentioned the “super-nice teachers,” and noted that when kids make mistakes, they’re encouraged to learn from them instead of being punished.
In the visual arts room, members of the blue group were painting costumes for their upcoming show. Sitting cross-legged on a blue tarp, the first graders dipped their paintbrushes in all different colors of fabric paint, intent on covering the entire t-shirt. Next to them were their sketches of the costumes, designed based on the character they were playing in the show. One young girl was painting a dark green stripe, the beginnings of an apron for her character, the rabbit. 

“Painters! Brushes up!” called the art teacher in the next room, and older kids—that’s the orange group—began expertly hopping around giant pieces of cardboard and paint containers on their way to wash their brushes at the sink. They stared down at their work: in colorful, cloud-like letters they’d written “The Chore Wars,” the chosen title of their upcoming musical.
The kids at Audubon Arts already proudly consider themselves artists. Whether they prefer the performing arts, or painting, “eventually we all become really good friends,” said Sukih, a student. They find kids with a similar kind of passion for the arts, a similar interest in originality.
Stephen Dest, the drama director, sees Audubon Arts as one of the few “safe spaces for the students to be themselves,” he said. Especially since the pandemic, he said, “there’s not a lot of places where you can feel fully safe, fully heard.” 

Top: Stephen Dest. Bottom: Noah Brown.
Drama Counselor Noah Brown, a rising sophomore at Bard College, noticed something similar. Here, “whatever you want to be, you can be,” he said. He takes inspiration from the many different personalities he meets in his work. “These kids grow up, and you literally grow up with the kids.”
After they cleaned up, members of the orange group headed down to join all other groups in the outdoor area behind the school for lunch and Audubon Arts’ open-mic performance. Every day, students can sign up to perform alone or with their friends, while the rest of the program claps, or even dances along.
Sitting on woodchips, students watched, impressed, as a girl with blue streaks in her hair presented a rehearsed dance to “Story of My Life” by One Direction. In the next act, three girls sang “The Nights” by Avicii. Soon, counselors joined them onstage, becoming impromptu background dancers.
“Everyone’s going to cheer and clap like we just watched a Broadway performance,” Creative Youth Development Coordinator Briana Louis said about Audubon Arts Open Mics. Although they brand themselves as mostly a musical theater program, “It’s really so much more than that,” she said.

Top: Audubon Arts Director Anne Tubis. Bottom: Briana Louis, Assistant Director and former Audubon Arts student.
Louis remembered her own time at Audubon Arts years ago as really encouraging. She was in the indigo group, and performed in their production of Legally Blonde as a high schooler. Now, she’s the assistant director of the program. Here, Louis said, they learn “how to be a collaborator in any sense.”
As the song ended, the girls quickly bowed, then ran off stage with big smiles.
In an interview just before the Friday’s open mic began, the counselor of the yellow group, Victoria “Vicki” Kirkland, said Audubon Arts is “a really, really great thing.” She had no idea she’d love working here as much as she did. She wants to come back another year.
“No matter what their talent is, no matter how much experience they have, everyone embraces it.” Kirkland said. “Because, you know, we’re all in this together, and I love that.”
This article comes from the 2024 Cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative. Magda Lena Griffel is a recent graduate of Wilbur Cross High School, where she edited the school newspaper, and is headed to Columbia University in the fall.