Article July 24, 2006 Issue

ART FOR LOVE'S SAKE

BY VIRGINIA SLACHMAN

TO LOOK AT HER "groundbreaking community activist" isn't the first phrase that pops to mind. In fact, Mary Jean Weber is most well known as a landscape painter—a signature member of the American Impressionist Society whose work hangs in hundreds of private and corporate collections.

But she is more than the sum of her pastels and oils. In the summer of 2002, Ms. Weber broke though racial and community barriers to bring healing to Cincinnati's Over the Rhine district, a section of town that in 2001 experienced racial riots so frightening they garnered national news coverage and threatened to tear open a city already tense about its inner-city problems.

How this white, suburban Sunday School superintendent, mother, and artist founded and continues to run Patchwork Kids, a summer program that has grown from serving 20—30 kids to having hundreds of children participate in its eight-week sidewalk chalk drawing sessions, is a study in, as she puts it, discomfort.

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