Arts Equity District

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Arts Equity District
acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 24” x 30”, 2020, SOLD

This is a manic mega meta sketchnote representing a year of meetings that I participated in as an arts partner and advocate for arts education with the San Francisco Unified School District. I became involved in all this as the executive director of the Arts Education Alliance of the Bay Area (I left that position in June 2020) and as director of the Where Art Lives program (which I continue to work on).

I collaged and copied notes from the meetings onto this canvas as part of my process for reflecting on my learning.

It includes portraits of many people who work passionately for and with the school district to make sure all students get the most comprehensive education possible.

This is a dense painting with a lot of content and a lot of context.

Here are some of the original sketchnotes and some explanations about who the people in the painting are and what some of the words mean.

Here is a drawing of Mela Lau-Smith which I drew while she gave a presentation about the school district’s efforts around attendance and their intention to put students and families at the center of their policy decisions.

You can see that I collaged this drawing directly into the painting.

Ruth Grabowski and Stefanie Eldred, in the foreground, lead the Community Partnerships office at the SFUSD. Much of the material in this painting are notes from meetings they organized.

I love their passion for their work and their insistence on moving school culture to accommodate students and parents rather than trying to force families to shed their own identities to fit in.

Much of the impetus of this inquiry is my role as director of the Where Art Lives program where I teach students about graffiti-style lettering. So as I dug into this painting, I was very much thinking about the role of artistic lettering in education amongst the student-characters I painted sitting at their classroom tables.

You might notice that the letters “PBL” (which is the education jargon abbreviation for “Project Based Learning”) are obscured and covered by the word, “INQUIRY”, which I believe is a more useful and powerful approach to real learning.

Chris Tsukida and his associate on the Service Providers Working group of the DCYF presented at a community partners meeting - representing after school agencies.

They talked about their work always putting teaching and learning at the center, represented by a tree - and plugged www.saveafterschool.com.

Portraits of Chris Tsukida and his colleague are collaged directly onto the canvas and I painted in their tree to give it a little more weight.

Here is a a sketch of Landon Dickey presenting about the African American Achievement and Leadership Initiative. Because of this presentation, I created a spreadsheet to collect information about arts resources that directly serve African American students.

I collaged this portrait of Landon Dickey directly into the painting and added the letters AAALI using some of the rudimentary techniques we teach in the Where Art Lives program.

This is a sketch of Khafre Jay I made during the 2019 Every Day, Every Way conference I helped organize when I was executive director of the Arts Education Alliance of the Bay Area.

Jay is the director of Hip Hop for Change, an exemplary organization. He says “It is your job to provide kids the tools to paint, the wall to paint on” and to “support all graffiti nerds.”

In my work for the Arts Education Alliance of the Bay Area, I was advocating for the SFUSD to adopt Create CA’s “Declaration of the Rights of All Students to Equity in Arts Learning” and was able to bring together a meeting of several arts education leaders with Board of Education Commissioner Alison Collins. Collins was getting ready to introduce a measure that would make SFUSD an arts equity district and move toward having a full time art teacher in every elementary school. I took notes about the conversation -

VAPA teachers want to be heard
SF families union
So the art teacher can be a part of that school community
SFUSD Math as a model
involve the people doing the work ➡ create scope and sequence ➡ where to find arts in high school
too much attention just on SOTA, so much arts excellence all over district
New VAPA standards framework for scope and sequence - Decentralize - can pathways happen decentralized?
RPA difficulties of DATA collection
New Curriculum Asst Supe
Where’s HIP HOP?

The question “Where’s HIP HOP?” stuck me as important to the program I was considering and connected to what Landon Dickey discussed in the AAALI goals.

I copied my portrait of Collins into the painting.

Collins and Commissioner Gabriela Lopez sponsored a resolution together to make SFUSD an Arts Equity District. The resolution passed in June 2019.

Samuel Bass was hired to become the new head of the Visual and Performing Arts Department of San Francisco schools so we invited him to present at an Arts Education Alliance of the Bay Area roundtable discussion in September 2019.

I copied this portrait and some of the words into the painting.

Here, Bass is pictured with the arts equity district badge that the district was able to add to its website.

As one of his first initiatives, Bass made instruments available to every 5th grade student. Instead of requiring families to spend their own money renting instruments, the district invested in enough instruments to meet the demand at every school. Bass would post pictures of these piles of instruments in their cases to social media, so I copied those pictures into this painting.

As part of my own reflection process, I was thinking about how I would like to contribute. This is a self portrait (with a new haircut) with the words:

Help students use their ART to demonstrate understanding of any subject. MAKE ART TOGETHER

As part of the Mosaic initiative, Nolberto Camarena of the office of professional learning, was given the task of developing arts integration with the schools.

The Mosaic initiative was shelved when California Prop 13 failed in March 2020 depriving the city of bond money for a new arts campus.

Camarena talked about the importance of process and student experiences. I paired this with imagery of the Thurgood Marshall band marching and playing through the Asian Art Museum during the Arts Education Resource Fair.

Targeted universalism is the idea that when you make sure that the needs of every person is met - for instance, when a classroom is made accessible for every student - you create the best version of that system.

For the Where Art Lives program, “targeted universalism” means that each student gets their own sketchbook so they each know that they are an artist.

Let us value the voice, the feelings, and the lived experiences of every young person in our society so that they can create a future we all want to live in.