Audio File
Transcript
My name is Cassius Plummer. I am 18 years old.
My name is Shemar Tinker. I am 18 years old.
We interviewed Camden Yandel on July 18th, 2018.
My birthday is June 16th. I was born in 1992. My childhood, I grew up in East Hills. I grew up in a house where I was raised primarily by my mother. My parents got divorced when I was two. I got to see my dad, like, twice a week. Got to see my mom every day. Played a lot of sports, had a lot of friends, had pretty bad grades in school, but all in all, it was a good experience. My mom was a special ed teacher for almost 30 years. She would come home after work and work, like, we’d do our homework together. She’d grade homework and I’d just do it. So I saw first-hand my mom and how hard she worked, how great she felt making a difference in youth’s lives. And I wanted to do that. I didn’t know I wanted to do that until later, but I always wanted to make a difference like my mom did. I worked with teenagers at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and recently left to take another position. But after leaving, I realized how important I was to a lot of the kids that came here, which has made me sad, but it’s also made me realize that I did a good job at the work that I was doing. So if you’re just succeeding, you don’t really learn anything. You’re just kind of coasting. If you fail, you will know what it’s like to fall. But you know what it’s like to pick yourself up. I love working with youth, and it’s a struggle sometimes, but it’s also super rewarding. Like, I’ve had a lot of moments where I’ve been teaching people how to do stuff, and they’re just not getting it, or they’re running around in circles, or like, they’re on their phones, or playing with their friends. After a while, they just get it, and it’s, like, awesome.
I had a teacher named Miss Hetrich. She was my ceramics teacher. She just kind of asked me what I was going to do for college and I had no idea. She was giving me all these art schools and telling me where I should go and that I should go to school for art, and I had never thought about it. I had always drawn my entire life, and I never thought about going to art school until she told me that I should. I applied for a couple of schools, requested a lot of information, and ended up going to Saint Vincent College in Latrobe and studied graphic design there. It’s not an art school, but they have a decent art program when I went. I got to meet a lot of people that thought differently than how I thought. It was an eye opening experience, I should say, but I also met a lot of people that were like me and were like minded and have a lot of those friends still from college and learned a lot from a lot of different teachers and different backgrounds.
My goals moving forward are to become a librarian for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. So, right now, I’m a library assistant, so I’d have to go get a masters in library science. Another goal is to publish my own comics. So 2017 was a really good year. I got to travel to the Netherlands for like 2 weeks and make art there. I worked out of a screen printing studio that one of my mentors has actually… he invited a friend of mine and I had to stay there to water his plants and also use all of his materials. It was the first time I had ever traveled to another country, and the work that I created there led to a residency at an art gallery called Bunker Projects that’s in Pittsburgh and Garfield. That’s like the most famous I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I had a really great show.
I’ve seen changes throughout the neighborhood, and I think it’s always been a positive place. I think it’s always had a strong community here. I felt like a part of it instantly. That said, like my whole family is from here, so it also helps to know a lot of the people that are here. Talk to the older people that are either in your lives or not in your lives, get to know them, get to know the history of your neighborhood. Walk around the Hill district to find out places that you might not have known about. Tell your friends about those places once you figure them out, share with each other. Asking for help when you need it is important. One of my teachers always told me “connecting the dots is important and figuring out what those dots are to connect.”