Local heroes

The Phoenix salutes nine individuals whose efforts make Rhode Island a better place

Newspapers often use up a lot of ink and paper (or pixels and Web sites, as the case may be) telling their readers who and what's gone wrong. In this, the third annual edition of the Providence Phoenix's "Best" issue, we instead highlight nine people and organizations who are doing exceptionally good work. These are local heroes who often labor behind the scenes. Yet they are changing the communities in which they're based for the better. Regardless of what neighborhood you live in, all of us in Rhode Island are in their debt.

Grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and prepare yourself to be inspired.

Josafina Rosario

Josafina Rosario

IF WE WERE to grab some words to describe 71-year-old Josefina Rosario, they might be these: family-minded, loyal, generous, enthusiastic, energetic, loquacious and busy, very busy. If anyone in her neighborhood in the Buttonwoods section of Warwick needs last-minute childcare or transportation to Providence, she's available. If friends of friends, or family of family, arrive from Bolivia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico or her homeland, the Dominican Republic, she'll shelter and feed them, find shoes for their children and furniture for their new home. And she'll introduce them to other Spanish-speaking emigrants in the Hispanic community that forms her extended family.

That family affectionately calls her Doña Fefa -- the latter a common nickname for Josefina, the former a term of respect, like senora. Doña Fefa and her husband, Tony, opened the first Hispanic market and restaurant in Rhode Island in 1959, on Broad Street, across from Roger Williams Park. In the '60s, after amendments to the Immigration and Naturalization Act emphasized family reunification, and more and more immigrants arrived in Rhode Island, Doña Fefa and her husband helped them fill out applications for citizenship and to register to vote. On election nights, the couple would drive people to the polls and encourage them to exercise that right.

For Doña Fefa never took democracy for granted, after living under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo and watching her mother raise 10 children alone (she was the youngest) after Trujillo's henchmen murdered her father. She came to New York in 1949 to live with her sister, met her Puerto Rican husband, and they moved to New Haven and then to Rhode Island.

Doña Fefa's desire to help was fostered by her intense empathy for the suffering of others, including that of the Kennedy family, to whom she felt very attached because of how John F. Kennedy urged Latinos to vote and encouraged Americans to do something for their country. She still volunteers at a nearby daycare center; and numerous citations -- noting her efforts for emergency vehicles sent to the Dominican Republic in 1993, and recognizing her as a "history maker" for her vital role in building Rhode Island's Hispanic community -- line the hallway of her home. Though she no longer recognizes everyone who says, "Hi, Fefa!" -- since they may be the grandchildren or cousins of people whom she helped -- she's proud of their attention and secure in the knowledge that just as she's taken care of so many, so they now look out for her.
-- Johnette Rodriguez

C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander

C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander

POETS C.D. WRIGHT and Forrest Gander are not native Rhode Islanders. Gander spent his youth in northern Virginia; Wright, in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. Yet their adoption of the Biggest Little is an integral detail in a literary pedigree that includes Edith Wharton, Galway Kinnell, Julia Ward Howe, and Robert Coover.

Married since 1983, they co-edit Lost Roads Press, a literary press started by the late poet Frank Stanford in 1976. Wright and Gander live with their 14-year-old son, Brecht, in Barrington, at the top of a slight hill and near an apple and berry orchard that's next to a cemetery. Wright says it reminded her of the Ozarks, and indeed, I've never seen Barrington conjure so much hill-and-hollow Arkansas.

Wright, the current chair of creative writing at Brown, and Rhode Island's state poet between 1994 and 1999, has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. Of her work, the poet Carolyn Forché says: "The territory is uniquely Wright's, but borders that of James Agee and Diane Arbus: Common, strange, and filled with risk. Throughout these poems, there is a saxophone playing and a poignant voice making sense."

Wright is currently collaborating with photographer Deborah Luster on One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. The book documents in text and photographs the lives of male and female prisoners in the state that proportionally incarcerates more of its population than any other. The title comes from Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line: "Maybe all men got one big soul where everybody's a part of -- all faces -- of the same man: one big self." To what extent does One Big Self reflect perpetual themes in her work? "No matter how you try to subvert your preoccupations," Wright says, "there is still some kind of core that poetry probes whether you want it to or not."

Gander, who teaches at Harvard, has won the Whiting Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He has been a translator and editor of Latin American poetry since he and Wright lived in Mexico in 1981. Two books of translation, as well as a book of his own poems, Torn Awake, are due to be published over the next two years. Gander says, "I'm interested in the poetic line as a means of perception, a muscular contracting and relaxing of the relation between self and world." In other words, maybe, who we think we are and how we talk to each other, and why, and how the poetic line addresses that.

It is very quiet in Gander and Wright's house, a quiet reminiscent of my violin teacher's home along a river in Indiana. Asked what it's like to be married to a poet, Gander says, "C.D. understands the silences and the unusual need for privacy sometimes." Wright adds, "It's that area where we're both found at our very best. There's no argument in that space we've sort of kicked out for poetry."
-- Kathleen Hughes

Umberto Crenca

Umberto Crenca

AS A SIXTH-GRADER at St. Lawrence Grammar School in North Providence, Bert Crenca worked all night when one of the nuns challenged him to create a poster. The youth -- "a bit of a discipline problem," as he recalls with a measure of understatement -- wowed his instructor with the result after going through 15 versions to get the poster right. It was the same intensity that Crenca would later wield to build AS220 into a nationally recognized force for the arts.

Crenca didn't begin to paint seriously until he was in his early 20s, and, "I realized it was a lot harder than I thought." Finding work in a print shop for Fleet Bank, he was fairly floored when a supervisor suggested that he go to school for art -- something he liked. But go he did, and Crenca's place in the local arts community was solidified when his first show, at a Steeple Street gallery, was panned by Journal critic Channing Gray.

AS220 sprang from the egalitarian ideal of Crenca and some like-minded friends of creating a place where any artist can show his or her work. It started in an upstairs space at the Providence Performing Arts Center in 1985, when the initial challenge was getting artists "to believe in our idea of participating," he recalls, before moving to Richmond Street and then 115 Empire St. From a rag-tag beginning, the community-oriented space has become a creative juggernaut that helped to put downtown Providence on the map and nurtured a variety of spin-offs, from the Providence Black Repertory Company to the Providence Film Festival.

Aside from a café/performance space that features the most idiosyncratic booking in the state, AS220 provides low-cost affordable housing and studios for local artists (like up-and-coming musician Erin McKeown), and low-cost computer and dark room facilities. It's also involved in a growing partnership with the state Training School, Rhode Island's juvenile prison, as evidenced by the November 10 debut of the Broad Street Studio, a transitional program for Training School alumni. Perhaps most importantly, AS220 is about to embark on a $3.5 million capital campaign to, as Crenca says, "truly institutionalize this place and sustain it indefinitely."

At the same time, Crenca has consistently fought to bring more people to the table, to widen the discussion and extend a hand to those in need, regardless of whether it's the proverbial starving artist or a young gallery owner whose capitalistic impulse is a little different from his own guiding sensibility.

Asked about AS220's growth, Crenca credits the organization's supporters and 17 staffers, adding, "I'm literally so busy, it doesn't hit home." But, he hastens to add, "some part of every day, I'm amazed and glazed," because of how AS220 has succeeded, reaching across boundaries of race and class, without compromising its founding ideals. "That's something that makes me feel a little bit high."
-- Ian Donnis

Carol Grant

Carol Grant

IN 1990, CAROL GRANT hit the ground running when she moved to Rhode Island to become the head of what was then NYNEX. She subsequently served as the first chair of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, chair of the Providence Chamber of Commerce, and vice-president of human resources at Textron. But after a decade on the corporate fast-track, Grant shocked colleagues and friends by leaving her job at Textron in September 1999. It was widely reported that her decision was based on wanting to spend more time with her children -- which was true -- but Grant also wanted to spend more time with herself.

In the midst of the millennium fervor, the 47-year-old exec contemplated a way to mark her own life: "What would be the most satisfying, most adventurous thing to do?" she recalls. "Almost in jest, I thought, `I'll take time off.' " Turning that daydream into reality involved long conversations with her husband, Charlie Otto, whose business, Electronic Evidence Discovery, takes him back and forth to New York City, and then sharing their decision with their daughter, Molly (now 10), and son Will (almost 13).

Grant wanted her time off to be at least an entire year with her family, and she declares that "just hanging out" with her kids -- watching a Little League game from start to finish, helping with sixth grade homework -- has been the best part. She watched them interact with friends and peers and, among other things, took a two-week car trip and faced the death of the family's 20-year-old cat with them.

Grant laughs at herself for not using her year off to become a great tennis player or get all her photos in albums. But it has taught her how deeply everyone is looking for the "right answers" for their own lives. Complete strangers have told her they're about to do a "Carol Grant." For this farm girl from Missouri-turned lawyer-wife-mother-corporate executive and then at-home mom, this break renewed her and made her ready to jump back into the "sprint pace" of work that she likes. "I'm more energetic and more confident," she says. "I've hung out with myself, and I'm more myself than ever."

Recognizing how fortunate she was to be able to take the time off, Grant asserts: "We owe it to each other to figure out how to let people be with their families. It's very important and rarely addressed. It needs to change. Getting the workplace right, I have great optimism about. But addressing family issues -- we're going to have to force ourselves to look at this."
-- Johnette Rodriguez

Jimmy and Cathy Ilarraza and John Dineenn

Jimmy and Cathy Ilarraza and John Dineen

ONE OF THE MOST disconcerting events of the last year for downtown artists and hipsters, and especially musicians, was what looked like the demise of the Safari Lounge. After buying the Safari in 1988, Jimmy and Cathy Ilarraza changed it from a classic "bucket of blood" to a friendly place where a colorful characters hang during the day and new bands play and build their following by night. The changing nature of the club scene in recent years has made it more difficult for young bands to break out, and with only AS220 and the Safari offering a freewheeling booking policy, the bar's loss would have been devastating. In January, things looked bleak indeed when 159 Weybosset Associates, a company of downtown real estate magnate Stanley Weiss, tried to evict the Safari Lounge.

Enter lawyer John Dineen. "I had been reading reports in the Phoenix about what was happening at the Safari Lounge, and it didn't seem right," explains Dineen, who, for many years headed the housing unit (specializing in landlord/tenant disputes) at Legal Services of Rhode Island. Although by now in private practice, the lawyer retains his strong concern for justice. Among other activities, Dineen regularly contributes his time and skills to the RI chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

After getting in touch with the Ilarrazas and offering pro bono assistance, Dineen found that Cathy Ilarraza's name wasn't included in the court papers filed by 159 Weybosset Associates, even though she was listed on the rental agreement. This omission led Judge Robert Pirraglia to decide that Cathy Ilarraza could not be evicted. Although the Safari prevailed in court, the agreement covered only 11 months. "Ironically, we've just been negotiating the lease extension," says a cautiously optimistic Dineen. "It looks like we have a deal where they can stay a couple more years."

The clash between the Safari owners and their landlord sparked the creation of Providence Artists United, a coalition of Downcity arts advocates, and inspired others to consider more carefully the course of the city's much touted renaissance in the arts and entertainment district. By providing a fun, cheap and accessible place for nascent bands to play, Jimmy and Cathy Ilarraza embody the true spirit of downtown creativity. And because of his commitment to the underdog, and his support for the arts, John Dineen has helped to preserve the Safari. Because of their combined efforts, we celebrate these three as local heroes.
-- Rudy Cheeks

Morgan Monceaux

Morgan Monceaux

MORGAN MONCEAUX'S paintings are larger-than-life, and their vibrant colors make one think more of satin and bathing suits and Jolly Ranchers than "primary colors" or "pastels." Monceaux, whose paintings are portraits are of popular figures, is a historian and storyteller -- or, as he says, "I'm a revisionist."

His paintings and stories have been gathered into children's books. The first, Jazz: My Music, My People, released in 1994, depicted the history of jazz, from Buddy Bolden and Cab Calloway to Nina Simone. The second, My Heroes, My People, released last fall, focused on black Americans and Native Americans in the old West. The paintings from each book have traveled all over the country. He is now painting historic dancers.

Born to a wealthy, established French/African American/Native American family in Louisiana in 1947, Monceaux grew up in segregated schools and attended Bishop College in Dallas for three years before doing two tours of duty with the Navy in Vietnam between 1964 and 1973. For 17 years thereafter, Monceaux traveled back and forth across America, accumulating addresses and occupations, including janitor, short order cook, substitute teacher, and commodities trader.

In 1990, he moved to the South Bronx. Shortly thereafter, he lost his job, his apartment, and found himself homeless. Then, only then, did he start painting, using materials he found on the street. "I found myself eating out of garbage cans," Monceaux says. "I was living a life that people never imagine themselves living, that I never imagined myself living."

Still homeless, he moved to Southampton, Long Island. At the town dump, he discovered a cache of good art supplies and set to work. "It just started pouring out and pouring out and pouring out," he recalls. Six months later, he saw work similar to his own at a local gallery and convinced the owner to look at his paintings. One month later, Monceaux had his first one-man show. It was 1992. Three years later, pulled by a romance, he moved to Providence.

In 1997, with donations from his publishers and family money, Monceaux started a trust to help young black artists attend college. "There are young artists out there who need to be nurtured," he says. "Sports will always be there, but what about the ones who will speak to us differently?" Monceaux doesn't want his art, or anyone's, to be perceived through a lens of race or sexuality. But, he says, "The art world is a segregated world . . . People of color have a hard time."
-- Kathleen Hughes