Pulse
To Russia, With Love
Inspired by Patch Adams, a Twin Cities physician who shares his last name runs an art gallery to aid Russian orphans.
Jan Adams, M.D., apologizes for the cramped quarters. As she sidesteps a stack of matted paintings and boxes of fund-raising letters ready for mailing, Adams laments about the need for more space. The need is obvious: Nearly every inch of wall in the five-room, 900-square-foot Maria’s Children art gallery is covered with bright murals and collages of ice skaters on a pond, medieval-looking cities, animals, and clowns, plus snapshots of some of the Russian children who made them. The floors and display bins overflow as well.
Wedged between a laundromat and a dollar store in a Savage, Minnesota, strip mall, the tiny storefront isn’t the kind of place that one would expect is an art gallery, let alone one that exclusively features the work of Russian orphans. And running the gallery is not something Adams, 61, a family physician who works evenings and weekends at Allina Urgent Care in Chaska, expected to be doing at this stage in her life. “I had no intention of getting this involved,” she explains. “This wasn’t my plan.” But like many of the paintings that hang on the gallery walls, “It just evolved.”
Clowning Around
Adams’ journey from full-time physician to gallery owner began in 1994, when she met Patch Adams, M.D. (no relation), who was speaking at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. Patch Adams, who is known for his use of laughter as medicine, asked her to join his troupe of clowns, which planned to travel to Russia the following year to perform in hospitals, orphanages, and nursing homes. “It was at the bottom of my to-do list because I knew nothing about clowning,” says Adams, who at the time owned the Sundance Medical Clinics in Jordan, Savage, and Shakopee and had a full-time medical practice. “I’m not an in-your-face kind of person, I dress conservatively, I’m not loud or boisterous. All the things I associated with clowning, I didn’t know how to do.”
But Adams was intrigued by the idea. “I had learned over the years that those things that tend to make us a little fearful often are the best gift for us,” she says. With that in mind, she donned a red nose and clown costume and traveled to Moscow.
During that trip, Adams met Maria Yeliseyeva, an artist who helped get the American clowns into orphanages. Yeliseyeva had taken a dozen 12-year-old orphans who had never as much as held a crayon into her studio to teach them about art and life. Under Yeliseyeva’s direction, the children made large, colorful collaborative murals of Russian landscapes and city scenes. “They look kind of like Grandma Moses meets Chagall,” says Adams, who has several hanging in the gallery as well as in her Shakopee home. At the same time, Yeliseyeva taught them life skills—how to cook, use a computer, manage money, even speak English.
“They are very damaged kids,” says Adams, explaining that many have been sexually and physically abused and that they’re cast out of orphanages at age 16 to fend for themselves with no education or job skills. “The children I met had horrific stories. I listened to these stories and saw these children who were in the studio and were incredibly joyful making this art … I looked at the ability, the skill, the joy, the dreams that Maria was able to bring out,” she says. “It was a wonder to watch them unfold. That may be why I got so involved.”
Eight Orphans, Four Cities
When Adams returned to the Twin Cities, she began selling greeting cards and calendars that featured the orphans’ paintings in order to support Yeliseyeva’s work. “When I went to Russia, it was a watershed time in my life,” Adams says. “My kids were grown, I was separating from my husband of 20-plus years. Although I wasn’t looking for any particular project to do, her project really looked authentic. Russia at that time was acknowledging 600,000 orphans, many of whom are labeled as mentally defective, even though they are not. Now they’re acknowledging 2 million orphans and 4 million street children. The need was great.”
With the success of the card and calendar sales, Yeliseyeva approached Adams about bringing some of the orphans to the United States in 2000 to do a tour of Washington, D.C., New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle. That prompted Adams to create a tax-exempt organization, the Maria’s Children International Foundation, to raise money to transport, house, and feed the 13 Russians, including eight orphans, who came over to show and sell their art.
The exhibitions brought visibility to the needs of the orphans, and they provided Adams with the names of more than 5,000 people interested in Yeliseyeva’s work.
After the tour, Adams, who had sold her clinics and left full-time medical practice in 1997 in order to devote more time to her charity work, opened the gallery. “I found
myself running an art gallery and a foundation, neither of which I’m trained in any way for,” she says. “It was a very steep learning curve.”
Moscow and Beyond
For Adams, taking on philanthropic challenges has been a way of life. Growing up in South Dakota and Iowa, her family instilled the importance of giving back to others. In 1969 as a medical student, Adams worked with four other students to open a free clinic on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota campus. Over the years, she has started a foundation to raise money for the Shakopee schools, traveled to Haiti on medical missions, and been the volunteer organist at Calvary Methodist Church in Shakopee.
Adams has raised between $100,000 and $150,000 a year for the Maria’s Children International Foundation since its inception through donations and the sale of paintings. (Paintings sell for $250 to $1,500.) In addition to Yeliseyeva’s project in Moscow, the foundation now provides funding for a second project in St. Petersburg that serves about 40 children and a third one in Dmitrov, two hours south of Moscow, that started about a year ago and works with up to 50 children.
Adams also has provided art materials to a man in Haiti, who has been teaching street kids local folk arts, and she hopes to fund a man in Puerto Morelos, Mexico, who wants to teach weaving to children who otherwise would have no way of earning a living.
Approximately 400 orphans, including some with cerebral palsy, have gotten a new start thanks to Yeliseyeva’s programs. Adams pulls out photos of some of the original 12 who worked with Yeliseyeva and explains how they’ve defied the odds: Sasha now manages the ground crew at a local park, Sveta is working at a fast-food restaurant, Jhanna is studying to become a preschool teacher, and Roma married an American and now lives in the United States with his wife and baby.
In an article Adams wrote about Maria’s Children for the May 2006 issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, she noted that the suicide rate among Russian orphans is 25 percent and that the average live span is 25 years. “We haven’t lost a child to death, haven’t had any suicides, don’t have any drug-addicted kids, don’t have any alcoholics,” Adams says of the children who’ve become involved with art. “These kids are doing what we want them to do: growing up, staying alive, figuring out how to live in a very challenging culture, and being able to earn a living at jobs they enjoy and experience some joy in their lives.”
Adams says she would like to have more—and better—space to display their work, space that says “art gallery” rather than “suburban strip mall.” She believes that would lead to greater visibility and, ultimately, more sales and
donations.
“My goal would be for the foundation to get to the scale where it can fund many, many projects all over the world,” she says. “That’s my vision, but who knows?”—Kim Kiser