Wearing a serene smile, 18-year-old Xavier stood amid a crowd at a downtown gallery, pointing out an artwork with painted layers of blue and green, anchored by earthy brown triangles at the bottom.
The piece, created while he was incarcerated at the local juvenile hall, now hangs inside the Merced Multicultural Arts Center.
Xavier, who the Merced FOCUS is only identifying by his first name, is among the teen participants in Cactus Flower, an art and mental health program run by the Youth Leadership Institute (YLI) in partnership with Merced County Probation Department.
The yearlong program, which teaches drawing and painting techniques to youth who are in custody, culminated in a public exhibit that opened July 9.
After completing his artwork, Xavier was released from custody and was able to attend the exhibit. But, most of the young artists remain at Merced County’s Iris Garrett Juvenile Justice Correctional Complex and have not been able to see their work on display.
Xavier couldn’t help but be “blown away” from all of the art that was displayed at the MAC. It was his first time ever attending an art gallery.
“I haven’t seen real paintings in my personal life. It was never something I really looked at until I came here,” Xavier said.
This year, for the first time, all proceeds from the sale of the artwork will go directly to the students rather than to the program.
“This is our second annual show,” said Jesse Ornelas, director of programs in Merced for Youth Leadership Institute. “Last year, there was a one-night art show. This year, the MAC agreed to host a six-week exhibit, and all the artists’ work is for sale.”
The program’s name is a deliberate nod to the multitude of vibrant, tenacious succulents that call the Golden State home.
“Just like a cactus flower thrives in harsh conditions and blooms into something beautiful, this art is being cultivated in juvenile hall and still comes out beautiful,” Ornelas said.
Art, mental health and making space inside juvenile hall
Inside juvenile hall, Cactus Flower blends structured art instruction with conversations about wellness.
Eddie Rodriguez, a local muralist, serves as lead artist for the Cactus Flower Art Program.
“We start off with skills training, so we’ll teach them different techniques of art,” he said. “Then we move on to emulating different artists, then personal projects, then group projects, and we close out with an exhibition.”
Crystal Ramos, a program manager at YLI, co-teaches with Rodriguez and helps shape the day-to-day classroom environment. She has worked with the current Cactus Flower cohort biweekly for a year.
“They’re very excited because we have snacks for them,” Ramos said. “Usually, a lot of their first questions are, ‘What are we doing today?’ We try to really mix it up so that way they can kind of stay engaged with the material.”
A lot of the work, she said, starts with challenging how the youth see themselves.
“A lot of these youth sometimes don’t view themselves as creative,” Ramos said. “When they’re in the incarceration system, they don’t have too much space to be creative. So when we have them in class, we really want to engage them in that.”
‘Much less about the art, but the sense of community’
While Cactus Flower is an art class on paper, Ramos says something deeper has taken root.
“When we were trying to have the art class in the juvenile hall, something out of it came that was much less about the art, but the sense of community they had with each other,” she said. “If one student was working on something, another would come over and say, ‘Hey, you should do this, you should do that.’”
That peer support, she said, is part of preparing them to return home.
“That sense of community is eventually going to help motivate them to want to work with others,” she said, “and then come back into the community with a broader sense of, ‘Hey, I can work with people, and I can trust people.’”
For Ramos, building trust starts with consistency.
“Really, trust with the young person is showing up every time, being a consistent person that they can rely on, and being open to receiving whatever it is that they want to talk about,” she said.
“To build trust is to give trust not as an educator, but as a community person that community is all around us, and we can’t forget those who might be out of our way.”
From ‘nothing to do’ to ‘all this positive stuff’
Xavier said he first joined the Cactus Flower classes because weekends inside Merced County’s Iris Garrett Juvenile Justice Correctional Complex offered little to do. What began as a way to pass the time quickly became something more.
There, he found a drawing that grabbed his attention. Once he started on it, he didn’t want to let it go.
Xavier talked about asking to bring the same piece back, week after week, adding new details each time until he was finally satisfied. What started as “nothing to do” turned into hours of focus over multiple sessions.
The class, he said, felt hands-on and full of “all this positive stuff.” Over time, Xavier began to look at art and himself differently.
He described feeling less like a kid just passing time in custody, and more like someone capable of finishing something he cared about.
As an artist and educator, Rodriguez sees that kind of shift often. Ironically, he says the conditions inside juvenile halls can promote the need to create art.
“One, you have a lot of time,” Rodriguez explained. “Two, you’re limited in your exposure. You don’t have as many distractions. Also, the limitation of materials. There’s something about limitations that actually promotes growth.”
Rodriguez’s own story mirrors that of many of his students.
“I was a troublemaker. I was in juvenile hall. I had gotten kicked out of school,” he said. “I used to do graffiti when I was younger. That got me into a sketchbook instead of a wall, then onto canvas, then into galleries – and now cities pay me to do spray paint on walls, which is so ironic.
“Because I went through a similar background, when I’m helping these kids, I feel like I’m giving back to my 12-year-old self,” he added. “This is what I needed when I was their age.”
Ornelas comes from a similar place.
“Just from my own lived experience of being an incarcerated youth, being able to create something and having that sense of accomplishment really helps people with their self-esteem,” he said.
That cohort, he added, started “normalizing conversations about mental health,” which, for locked-up teens, is no small thing.
“We’re changing the narrative of incarcerated youth,” Ornelas said. “They’re not just there to take resources. They have the ability to beautify where they live.”
At YLI, he added, staff reject the idea that youth are only “the future.”
“We always hear, ‘Young people are the future,’” he said. “They’re experiencing life in society right now, and they can be part of solutions now, not later.”