E-Mail This Article to a Friend Leslie MacWeeney Executive director of the Dorchester Community Center for the Visual Arts BY CAMILLE DODERO

PEOPLE DON’T USUALLY forget me because I’m so unusually small," says Leslie MacWeeney, executive director and co-founder of the Dorchester Community Center for the Visual Arts (a/k/a "Dot Art"). "And I have this weird voice because I have only one vocal chord."

MacWeeney isn’t exaggerating. Diminutive, with a twittering soprano lilt, the Ireland native is an animated woman, the kind who fills up a room with her winding monologues, girlish giggle, and use of words like "ghastly" and phrases like "whizzed-up." A mother and former MassArt instructor, she also emanates the indefatigable energy of a round-the-clock educator. "I was once driving a car in Sweden," she said last Monday evening at Copley Square’s Cloud Foundation, where she oversees an open studio for Dorchester teenagers two days a week, "and I stopped at the border post at Customs, and this fella looked in the window and said, ‘Are you a teacher? You look like a teacher.’ I don’t want to look like a teacher — I never got over it."

A Dorchester resident for 25 years, MacWeeney helped found Dot Art — a nonprofit community organization whose self-avowed mission is "to offer stimulating and rewarding visual-arts programs to everyone in Dorchester" — about six years ago with 15 others, after she’d left MassArt to raise her son. Realizing that South Dorchester had no community art center, she decided to teach after-school art classes three days a week for elementary-school students. Right away, the need for something more substantial became obvious. "I would get loads of phone calls from people asking for scholarships. And they wanted more classes if the classes were full."

Over the last six years, Dot Art has grown into a multi-branched program with about 20 semester-long courses for both adults and children that caters to around 500 students a year. Scholarships are available thanks to sundry donors, grants, and money from foundations. With Dot Art’s main office still housed in MacWeeney’s dining room, she has become an unofficial community liaison: art teachers, principals, and community groups are constantly soliciting her help to establish programs in the schools or for organizations.

But Dot Art’s signature program is a six-week program for teenagers, in which accepted students earn minimum wage to create visually arresting paintings and plaster sculptures that later get displayed publicly in places around town. "Making little puppets that you can’t show anywhere is not what teenagers want." ("I’m in the Picture," an exhibition of this work, is on display right now at MassArt’s Arnheim Gallery.) In essence, the summer program aims to show inner-city kids the value of art.

During these days of state fiscal crisis, Dot Art’s efforts have become ever more critical. Whenever school systems face budget cuts, art departments are typically the first to go. "In some places," says MacWeeney, "if they have a marching band or something like that, they keep it because it’s a very social activity — that’s preferable. Art is suspect, you see. Because it’s lonely. It’s singular, you know what I mean? And society suspects that. There’s something a bit weird there, something odd going on that we don’t understand with that person in the corner painting."

And so MacWeeney is always trying to convince people that visual art is, well, inclusive. "It’s something that everybody can do, I tell people. ‘No, I can’t draw a straight line,’ they say. People have no idea they have this ability to create. And then they do amazing things and their own self-esteem is just whizzed-up."