Art in the Community Director Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez shares an update on the conclusion of the Annual Student Show and the beginning of the program’s popular STEAM Camps:
Our Cinco de Mayo parade will never be the same again! Not only was the Richmond Art Center one of the parade’s official sponsors for the first time ever, the partnership between our Art in the Community programs and the Peace and Unity Cinco de Mayo Parade Committee resulted in two colorful floats and lots of community participation.
The floats were designed and built by Latino families from San Pablo and Richmond who attended a free, eight week float design class taught by teaching artists Neil Rivas and Patricia Rodríguez. The idea behind this class was to get teens involved in a civic effort that would encourage them to learn about the parade’s history, submit a proposal for a public art piece, and take an idea through the entire design process. The classes were possible thanks to the generosity of the San Pablo Koshland Fellows and the parade’s steering committee.
The art of more than a thousand students is on display during the Center’s 3rd Annual Art in the Community Student Show, running through Friday, May 29. To celebrate the exhibition’s opening, a free, public opening reception was held on Sat., May 9, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
This year the show doubled in size, featuring the ceramics, digital prints, metal works, prints, screen prints, murals, super hero costumes, floats, paintings, zines, collages, stop motion animation and mosaics of our after school and residency programs. More than 18 Richmond, San Pablo and El Sobrante sites were represented.
Art in the Community Director Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez shares an exciting update on how the program is engaging Richmond families in support of one of the city’s most important cultural celebrations of the year, Cinco de Mayo:
An amazing team from KTVU stopped by last month to produce this short documentary about our work. The video aired last night at the Lesher Center for the Arts before a talk by Robert Edsel, the author of The Monuments Men.
We came across this KQED article “How Integrating Arts Into Other Subjects Makes Learning Come Alive” and it’s a pretty good reminder of the importance of our arts programs.
Our Art in the Community program is leading an effort to bring the nationally recognized STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) education to Richmond in collaboration with several local organizations. These programs bring arts back into local schools while embracing the philosophy mentioned in the article: “Arts integration seems to be the best form of differentiation out there because it taps into so many different interests and abilities and forms of learning.”
Another important component of our Art in the Community program is offering annual professional development workshop series to help teachers integrate art into their classroom through hands-on activities. As the article stated, we also acknowledge that arts integration can be a hard model for teachers to embrace if they don’t feel like they themselves are competent artists.
What’s Your Superhero Power? That’s one of the questions our teaching artist, Neil Rivas, is asking a group of 15 students in our “Clavo’s School for Young Superheroes” class at the Atchison Village community center. The students are using art, literacy and digital media to envision themselves as a superhero charged with the goal of helping their community.
The students, ages 7 to 10 years old, are writing out and drawing their superhero origin stories in sketchbooks and will then create the special garments that their superhero will wear. Once these costumes are finished, the kids will visually document their superhero during a photo shoot. All of this work will culminate with the students making a final presentation to an audience of parents, teachers and community members.
Like all of our Art in the Community programs, this class is helping to bring arts education to children who don’t have access to it in their school day. Equally important, this class is also a rehearsal and a way to get kids thinking about the type of work they could do in the future.
Great article in the NY Times that talks about the huge benefits of using art as a teaching tool.
We firmly believe that STEAM (science, technology, engineering, ART, match) and arts integration are crucial in K-12 education. Using art as a tool to teach students about the STEM subjects, ensures that creativity doesn’t fall by the wayside and is an important part of our Art in the Community programs.
When a child learns to think like an artist, she can apply that thinking to any career she pursues, which is why our efforts to bring this innovative initiative – STEAM – to Richmond children is so important. We’re helping our city’s next generation how to think creatively, to be innovative and preparing them for any career they choose.
This article originally appeared in the NY Times, you can read it there as well.
By Henry Fountain
Engineering and art were not always completely separate disciplines. Take Leonardo da Vinci, who seamlessly combined the two.
“Five hundred years ago, you couldn’t really tell the difference between artists and engineers,” said James Michael Leake, director of engineering graphics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. But education has become balkanized and the field of engineering, in particular, more specialized, complex and math- and computer-oriented. Today’s engineering majors have little room for other pursuits.
