Warren woman's art gives her an outlet to the world

Down Syndrome was never a roadblock for Leah Keith’s creativity. She just opened her first art studio in Warren

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After a life spent looking for a voice and her place in the world, Leah Keith has finally found both.

Her voice comes out through poetry and painting, and her home is the art studio she recently opened at 30 Cutler St. in Warren. As a person with Down Syndrome, the 30-year-old artist’s life has not always been easy, and finding true acceptance as a child growing up in Barrington was often difficult. But painting and writing are friends that have taken her away from hard times — feelings of isolation, her mother’s recent health scare, and the search for true relationships and friendship. They’ve also helped her express the joy she feels when she thinks about life, her friends and family, her love of cooking and a million tiny thoughts that come to her every day.

When she sits down with pen and paper or paints, she runs free:

“It is like the weather,” she writes in “The Wild of Life.” “Everything changes. Underneath your shadow, your mask of yourself. Ripping inside of your heart. Inside of my soul and our breath … That sacred field in the woods, where all the animals come out to play.”

Said Leah: “I’m happy when I write and paint. It all comes out and I just let it.”

Ms. Keith, who moved from Walnut Road in Barrington to Warren’s Touisset a year ago, will open her new studio to the public this Thursday, June 29, during Bristol Warren Art Night. Everyone is invited to attend. The small studio, which she shares with two other artists, is filled with her framed poems and bright, abstract paintings. She goes in at least once a week to work, spending other days working at CVS Pharmacy in Barrington or at home. Whether she’s there or not, the ideas continue to flow, and she works on, or thinks about, art every day.

“I always knew that Leah was amazing, from day one,” said her mom, Debbi Coury. “She’s taught me so much about who she is, about who I am, about the world. About how to be strong. She’s amazing.”

When Leah paints, she paints on her own. But when she writes, she often enlists the help of Steve Alfano, a member of the support staff at Options, Inc., which works with adults with developmental disabilities. While Leah certainly benefits from Mr. Alfano’s help, he says he has learned innumerable lessons from Leah as he transcribes her spoken word, stream of consciousness poetry as fast as he can scribble.

“She has a great way of opening up to me,” he said. “She has a great ability to put descriptions on things that really transcend description. That’s what amazes me. With color contrasts and wording contrasts, she has a way of getting across ideas that are really abstract but really have a lot to say if you listen.”

Though her mother realized early on that her daughter had a sparkling intellect, deep soul and was kind and strong, others didn’t always see it. While she was involved in youth theater during her time in the Barrington school system, she never got the chance to shine as she would have hoped. Much of that changed when she started attending theater classes at Bristol Community College. There, she was welcomed into the scene with open arms and acted in at least four plays, writing several skits as well. Her confidence bloomed and she thrived in what was the first true community she’d ever known. Time in the theater naturally progressed into the visual arts and after she took general art classes through the Rhode Island School of Design, the gates that held her creativity at bay swung wide open. When they did, it poured out.

As she started writing, her voice became stronger and her confidence grew. Over the last several years Ms. Keith’s poetry has won regional and national competitions, and she was named the Poet Laureate of the VSA of Rhode Island, a state organization on arts and disability. Her poems have won first and second place awards in competitions and she has read them publicly, including recently at Pawtucket Town Hall. She won one competition so many times (three first places and one second) that she is no longer eligible to compete. She laughs when her sister Melissa mentions that.

And how does she create?

“I think of it as a voice in my head. It’s always there and (when I create art) it just comes out on its own. I’m happy when I paint and when I write poetry. It all comes out.”

When it came time to name her studio, it didn’t take her long to come up with a title that summed up what her art meant: “I Am Leah” was the perfect choice.

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