Art and Resistance Through Education (ARTE)

I am applying to support my work with Art and Resistance Through Education (ARTE) that works to amplify the voices of young people of color for human rights change through the visual arts.

For young people, ARTE has developed a specific opportunity for them to learn the basic organizing and artistic skills needed to create the societal change that moves beyond sharing digital content across their own social media networks. #YouthVoicesLead, our newly launched, paid digital training program, provided them with an opportunity to develop meaningful artistic content to reach a wider network of their community members and beyond to galvanize concrete human rights change, and hopefully one day in the public space. 

In just a few weeks, we had over 130 youth applicants from across NYC. Many students learned from their teachers at school and one student even heard about it from "two mothers talking about it on the subway." Last month, we graduated our inaugural class, who developed a Virtual Summit, educating their peers and community members on the issues of mass incarceration, housing, education, and the right to health. There is a clear need for this program to be expanded. We are just getting started. 

I identify as an educator, artivist (artist + activist) and youth advocate. 

Regarding my past, I rarely tell people what my father did for a living. My mother sheltered me from the specifics of his role as a custodian at a California state prison. Despite her sheltering, internalized racism and anger bled into our home. I now realize how racism and anger were the residual effects of the violence my father witnessed in prison.

My mother, frustrated with her abusive, alcoholic husband, attempted to leave him numerous times. I remember packing our clothes and heading straight to my grandmother’s house after school. I remember calling the police, hiding bruises, and feeling isolated from friends because I felt voiceless.

Despite this violence, I went to college. As I read about prison conditions, I grew angry about the prison industrial complex and began to organize. I do my work so that youth of color can share their own stories and realize their agency to drive change. 

Presently, I am temporarily in Vienna serving as the George Soros Visiting Chair at the School of Public Policy at Central European University.

My future is to continue to expand and make ARTE's work truly sustainable. 

Youth of color experience a disproportionate amount of human rights abuses in this country. On the systemic level, they encounter emotional and physical trauma and violence through interactions across several institutions, including the incarceration and immigration systems. This exposure to violence and trauma has life-long effects that can negatively impact entire generations.

This experience of trauma is exacerbated when one lacks the language to articulate that a wrong has taken place. Human rights supplies a vocabulary for demarcating between right and wrong. When people are unaware of their rights, it becomes likely their rights are violated.

ARTE disrupts the cycles of trauma and violence by harnessing the artistic, socio-political, and community power of youth to amplify their voices and organize for change using three strategies across programs:

First, ARTE educates youth on human rights and equips them with the knowledge to identify the root causes of systemic inequity.

Second, ARTE provides them with the space to express their own experiences and reflections around human rights through interactive, multimedia visual arts programming.

Finally, ARTE equips youth with organizing skills that enable them to collectively work more effectively in steering society towards greater justice, such as workshop facilitation and public speaking.

ARTE uniquely exists at the intersection of human rights education (HRE), youth development, and the visual arts. We operate within a larger ecosystem of social justice that uniquely adopts a HRE framework. This is to ensure that youth are equipped with long-term tools and strategies to build a human rights culture in their communities and to disrupt systemic oppressions.

Youth leadership is at the forefront of our work. Frequently students of color are already knowledgeable on the issues that directly impact them, yet may lack the platform to make concrete change. For this reason, we cultivate youth leadership and amplify youth voices so that they can connect their collaborative public arts projects to tangible campaigns for human rights change.

We know that art education and programming enhances critical thinking, empathy, and confidence. ARTE’s innovative value proposition is that we use the visual arts as the springboard for youth to organize networks of their peers around issues that they are passionate about. For instance, with continued detention of children at the border, the need for readily accessible organized networks of youth has only increased. Through Elevate, ARTE will receive the boost it needs to creatively meet that need much faster. 

ARTE has already impacted nearly 6,000 individuals through our workshops and longer-term mural projects. Creating public art, youth have volunteered over 15,000 contact hours, which includes learning artistic and organizing skills.

ARTE has delivered our own curriculum in workshops across 30 institutions, creating opportunities for hundreds of youth in schools, jails, and community-organizations to discuss the social issues that directly impact them. Here undocumented youth have reflected on their own migration stories, incarcerated youth talked about their encounters with racism, and girls have shared their gender violence stories.

Since December 2018, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)’s 70th anniversary, ARTE was approached by ThoughtMatter, a branding company, to collaboratively re-design/re-imagine a more accessible UDHR. In June 2019, ARTE successfully fundraised to print 4,000 copies of the UDHR. We will disseminate this document and develop capacity- building workshops for youth, creating spaces to better reflect, understand, and empathize around human rights.