Kindred Spirits: Studio aims to help the brain through art

SUGAR HOUSE — Julius Matthew Steubing was the catalyst for his mother becoming a director of an art school — Kindred Spirits — when he was born . . . dead.

Before her son's birth, Alison Perreault-Steubing was a happy and successful wife, involved in community affairs, and an accomplished, practicing visual artist.

"Twenty minutes before Julius was extracted, his umbilical cord got pinched off," said Perreault-Steubing. "He suffocated for a prolonged period of time."

The doctors quickly resuscitated Julius, but within hours he went into seizures — then, a coma.

"When he came out of it," she said, "he started screaming, and he screamed continually for nine months." Julius' central nervous system had become overly sensitive to light, sound, even touch.

"I just kept thinking he was going to come out of it, that he was going to be different, that he wasn't going to be a statistic, that it would be different for him."

Distraught, Perreault-Steubing turned to reading books about the brain. "I needed to find out what happened." But the more she read, the more real and final her son's condition appeared: Julius had spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy.

After Julius' birth, Perreault-Steubing abandoned her artistic pursuits, saturating herself in science; but the shortage of creative expression eventually took a toll.

"Art was my life. But when something tragic happens in your life you lose yourself, and you can forget who you were before. All of a sudden we (she and her husband Matthew) were trapped inside the house."

By the time her son was 3, Perreault-Steubing determined to find "a way to remember who I was, bring the arts into our life, bring Julius into the arts, if possible; have him in the studio and experience it." She resolved to try and teach Julius art, along with a few other kids with similar disabilities.

"So I went back into what I was, what I'd done my whole life, believing that through the arts and activating creative parts of the brain, we could maybe partake of something healing."

In the late summer of 2002, Matthew secured art studio space, and with her own art supplies and years of educational project ideas at her fingertips, Perreault-Steubing gave birth to Kindred Spirits, a place for people of differing abilities to come together and grow creatively by learning about art and each other.

Because of Perreault-Steubing's extensive art background, she decided early on that the art the kids created would not be something to be thrown away after a while; for her everything had to be archival.