By JENNIFER 8. LEE
March Nazaury Delgado shyly showed his iPod Touch to an art teacher, flicking his finger across the images he had created with Photoshop on his home computer.
The teacher, Cornelius Van Wright, asked if he could print them out. After he had looked at them again, Mr. Van Wright hurriedly summoned the rest of the teachers at the Fred Dolan Art Academy, a Saturday arts program that works with at-risk teenagers in the Bronx.
“We couldn’t believe it,” said Neil Waldman, an illustrator who founded the arts program, and who was stunned by the carefully manipulated overlays of faces and colorful textures. “I almost fell on my face. The work was so remarkable.”
For years, Mr. Delgado, then a high school senior, had been considered a solid, if unremarkable, artist in the program — though one who had benefited from its discipline. At 11, he had found his father dying of a drug overdose in the bedroom. He fell in with the wrong circle of friends, had run-ins with the police and straddled the line of failing classes. He suffers from a learning disability that makes reading difficult.
But in his junior year, he had asked Mr. Waldman, “Is it too late for me?”
It wasn’t. If he focused on his art and schoolwork, he was told, he could graduate from high school and perhaps go to a community college.
“I decided to become a different person, change my attitude,” said Mr. Delgado, now 19.
But as the teachers looked at the images, they realized that Mr. Delgado should be applying to the top art schools in the nation. With just one week before the last round of applications were due at many schools, he and his teachers scrambled to get the full slate of requirements done: a self-portrait, a three-dimensional model, a logo and an artistic interpretation of the quotation “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
And they also included a portfolio of his computer-manipulated pieces. While the art academy assignments had left him uninspired, the flexibility of Photoshop empowered Mr. Delgado. Often working through the night, he transformed humdrum photos taken with a budget camera into gripping, rippling portraits using transparencies, overlays and gradients.
“There are some people who have an innate ability to create spectacle, something innate that you can’t teach,” Mr. Waldman said.
The news came in June: Mr. Delgado had been accepted to the Fashion Institute of Technology on a full scholarship.
But a hurdle remained. To get help for his learning disability, he needed an educational assessment from a licensed psychologist. The fee for that, $625, was out of reach of Mr. Delgado and his mother, who earned $125 a week doing child care.
The cost was covered by the Children’s Aid Society, one of the seven beneficiary agencies of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. With the assessment, Mr. Delgado was able to take advantage of tutoring, counseling and the opportunity to take tests without a time constraint.
All seven of the students who have graduated from Fred Dolan Art Academy since its founding in 2006 have gone on to college. That had always been the intent of the academy, which was founded by Mr. Waldman, himself a product of the Bronx and the first in his family to go to college. He named the academy after a close friend, a principal, now deceased.
Mr. Delgado started college this fall as a communications design major. But the financial constraints still create divisions. Most of the other students use the sleek Macintosh laptops that many computer artists favor, while Mr. Delgado has an aging Dell that often crashes when he runs Photoshop.
And since his scholarship does not cover dorm fees, he commutes an hour each way, riding from the last stop on the D train to the school on West 27th Street.
But he has managed to earn some extra income. For Christmas, Fred Dolan’s daughter asked Mr. Delgado to create a portrait of her father in his distinctive style to give to her mother. She paid $200.
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