Social Justice

Expectations:

My art teacher uses Art PBGRs and learning targets with the things we do in class. These are the ones that I think align with my goal above.

Responding - Perceive and analyze - Interpret intent and meaning - Apply criteria to evaluate -

• a. Hypothesize ways in which art influences perception and understanding of human experiences. (VA:Re7.1.HSI)

  • *I can use evidence to explain the ways in which artwork communicates ideas about the human experience.

• b. Analyze how one’s understanding of the world is affected by experiencing visual imagery. (VA:Re7.2.HSI)

  • *I can analyze how visual imagery can influence my understanding of the world.

Connecting- Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal experiences to make art - Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural and historical context to deepen understanding -

• b. Describe how knowledge of culture, traditions, and history may influence personal responses to art. (VA:Cn11.1.HSI)

  • *I can describe how culture, traditions, and history may influence personal responses to art.

  • *I can identify the ways in which my attitudes and beliefs influence my interpretations of artwork.

This is the arts rubric my teacher always uses for our projects:

Action Steps

The Vermont Arts Council's web site describes the work we did: Artist in residence Mary Lacy led an immersive, semester-long exploration of art and community for high schoolers in the Burlington City & Lake Semester program (BCL). Near the end of the semester, each student made an original piece of art in response to the question, “What makes community thrive?”

I am a student in the Burlington City and Lake Program. The reason I decided to join this program is because of its philosophy:

• We believe young people need and deserve to be taken seriously.

• We believe learning doesn’t have to happen in the classroom.

• We believe in the joy of learning.

• We believe in the value of all voices.

• We believe our futures are interconnected.

• We believe that students can have a real impact in the world now.

Each student in the program was supposed to create a piece of art around the question "What makes community thrive?" and put an image of their piece on a slide. The really cool part was that we looped all the slides together, then continually played the slide show on the side of the Old North End Community Center. It was awesome and beautiful. We even presented this show at Burlington High School, Arts Riot, and at Burlington’s Highlight New Year’s Eve celebration.

The flyer my friend made for the event is below:

Evidence of Learning

The piece I created is below. I focused on "empathy" because I believe that to make the world a better place you have to have empathy. I'm also including a slide from another one of my friends because I liked the idea of "curiosity" making a community thrive.

“What makes community thrive?” Empathy

This piece of art has two main intentions behind it. The first is to challenge people to confront their biases and live in the world with an open mind. I hope that people will be inspired to bring more empathy with them into their lives and the lives of others. The second is to humanize people. My piece has a background of newspaper clippings, representing the stories that every person has to tell, and the common experience that we share. The paper cut-out figures are real people who had their pictures as part of a story in the newspaper. One of them is a little boy who loves to dance who won a birthday competition in the KidsVT newspaper. Another is a Bhutanese woman whose family started a religious group here in Burlington. The last is a musician who was featured in Seven Days. The simple, black-and-white silhouettes represent diverse people in our community, yet when you look at them you can’t immediately ascribe characteristics to them based on race, ethnicity, age, religion, ability, or any number of other labels. The silhouettes represent people and their unique stories before anything else.

Reflection

After the event, one of the biggest things I was feeling was like I was expressed. Our art expressed us in a way I was unaware it could. Through art as our platform, we could express our learning, our creativity, and a lot of ourselves.

I want my art to provoke the audience. I want them to think about the idea of representation and to really think about if we practice this idea as city. If not what is their role in helping make sure that we do make sure that we all feel heard and represented? Burlington needs representation because we all want to thrive, but that is impossible if we aren’t listening and including the voices of all Burlington residents.

"I want my art to portray the experience of being a part of BCL, which focused on hands-on and experiential learning in our community. The hands-on learning we did in BCL motivated us to take action and make a difference."

"I hope [this artwork] provokes people to think about communities that they are a part of and decide if they are thriving and think about some of the barriers that restrict them or others from thriving. By getting people to become more aware of the systems and communities they function in, then hopefully they will start to make improvements for themselves and others. Burlington is an extremely diverse community and art like this can provoke its members to hold themselves accountable for the quality of life here and make sure we thrive together. "