artistic activism

Research and Final Projects 2024

June 11, 2024 by Jessica C Hamlin

In Spring 2024 we were all feeling the anxieties and conflicts that were headlining news feeds in the US and globally: Hamas’ attack in Israel, Israel’s war in Palestine, Republican and Democratic accusations and fighting, a former president on trial and found guilty of 34 felony counts, immigrants seeking sanctuary, and the realities of climate change and extreme weather. Inside our classroom spaces we were grappling with these larger conversations, while also focusing on the realities and possibilities for public schools, for art curricula, and for meaningfully engaging students. Our Research and Final Projects class began by asking what topics and concerns were top of mind for emerging teachers. We identified issues such as restorative justice and art education, anti-racism efforts and DEI training in schools, art education in the anthropocene and AI and technology.

Screenshot of website with colors describing different class topics Eventually students formed groups to explore 4 topics using a collective inquiry to action methodology:

Class Size Policy (Rebecca Maric, Melissa Quizhpe, Stephanie Wan)

AI in the Art Classroom (Genevieve Felsenstein, Daniel Martinez, Ros Sterling Winner)

Critical Multiculturalism and Multilingual Learners (Jovanny Leon, María Molina, Annie Yoo)

Student Mental Health and Wellness (Heather Broday, Emily Nodell, Skylar Spitaleri)

We explored creative research methods including visual mapping, interviewing and surveys, photovoice and radical listening to learn about these topics and implement them in collaboration with students and teachers in New York City. In addition to doing research specific to each topic, we looked at the work of socially and civically engaged artists to help us think about how we take our knowledge and learnings and engage other people in order to enact necessary change in the world. In the end, each group created a proposal for an ‘Action’ to share their learning and transform their knowledge into impact. Students staged a public performance to help advocate for greater awareness and participation in reducing class sizes in New York City, they produced an interactive handmade Zine to help teachers build their familiarity with and ability to navigate the critical aspects of AI in a visual art curriculum, they created an online mental wellness resources for NYC high school students and a curriculum and toolkit using photovoice to support new students arriving in NYC from other countries. Each group presented their work, their research process, and their final resources with each other offering them as tools to support their future teaching and share with friends and colleagues.

Photograph of classroom with students sitting around a table talking Group photo of students smiling

Restoring Voices Zine

January 10, 2024 by Jessica C Hamlin

Research and Final Project Spring 2023 ItAG: Restorative Justice and Students at Risk

ItAG members: Rae Powers, Clare Eunbi Cho, Mayumi Tan, Antonella Damelio

Disciplinary approaches vary from school to school, but research shows that punitive disciplinary actions are prevalent across NYC Public schools. These policies negatively affect students on mental health, overall well-being, academic performance, and their relationship with the school. In addition, they disproportionately affect Black and Brown students, who are more likely to be suspended, expelled, and arrested for minor offenses compared to their white peers, ultimately leading them through a pipeline to the criminal justice system (González, 2012). The inequalities that BIPOC and low-income students receive for funding, support, and over-policing reinforce racial and economic imbalances and perpetuate the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

As a response, our group looks towards Restorative Justice and its compassionate humanizing practices that look away from harm and punishment, and deeply considers the support and accountability for harm with people directly involved (Project Nia, 2021). This provides an alternative route to addressing discipline in schools. Art can play a critical role in this process as it can be used to help explore emotions, thoughts, and perspectives that help us build empathy through the sharing of experiences. Restoring Voices, a zine made in collaboration with students, faculty and staff around NYC, hopes to explore the ways in which restorative practices can be applied in schools to foster a sense of community that directly supports students and addresses their needs. Restoring Voices, aims to elevate student experiences and help restore power to the voices that matter most, the students.

Research methods for this project included: Interviewing student led restorative justice circles, interviewing deans and practitioners of restorative justice, running group writing reflections on school experience with students, Photovoice: Mapping Student Experience, power mapping with teachers/faculty/staff, & student/faculty/staff surveys.

Download a copy of the Restoring Voices Zine

The Art [Ed.] of Wellness Podcast

January 10, 2024 by Jessica C Hamlin

Research and Final Project Spring 2023 ItAG: Teacher Wellness

ItAG members: Janice Quiles-Reyes, Marianne Vormer, Vila Gao

Teacher burnout is a continuous conversation that is happening among educators everywhere. As an ItAG group, we were interested in looking at the different elements that lead to burnout, as well as resources and support for educators. We specifically looked at mental health, general responsibilities for teachers, and the increased stress with a lack of administrative support that teachers are experiencing. We also wanted to hear advice that current teachers have for new teachers entering the DOE to help subside some of this burnout.

There are several reasons why our group wanted to focus on teacher wellness. As new art teachers about to enter the profession, it’s helpful to know what it’s like to be a teacher; questions such as the responsibilities, workload, and support from the community are just some of the things that we centered our conversations around. After learning about the burnout that teachers are experiencing, it was also essential to learn how teachers can actually work to overcome this burnout. Through research and interviews, our group was able to compile short podcast episodes that break down teacher wellness into the following episodes: teacher burnout, self-care rituals, and advice for new teachers. The podcast is meant to be supportive and helpful to new art teachers specifically, although new teachers in any subject area can benefit. Our team hopes that the podcast can inspire and shed some light on the profession as a whole, as well as prepare teachers for the role they are entering.

https://open.spotify.com/show/0gGZxoIBwILSurxzWemNgw?si=68a61cb2351744df

We invite all those who listen to the podcast to record a sound bite or write a comment that connects back to our topic and can help generate a conversation around teacher wellness overall: https://www.videoask.com/fd7d1tsbu

Teacher wellness is a topic that everyone in the NYC Department of Education should be talking about, and we hope that this podcast not only serves as a resource for new teachers but also as a starting point for voicing concerns and opinions centering on teacher wellness.

Research and Final Projects 2023

October 30, 2023 by Jessica C Hamlin

As the culminating experience in the NYU Art+Education program, students have a chance to dive deeper into a question or topic that they have been thinking about in their time in K-12 schools and seminars, ideally finding a way to connect theory with practice and generate new knowledge that will support their teaching and activism in the classroom. Using an Inquiry to Action (ItAG) model, students work in small groups to pursue a question they generate at the intersection of Art+Education. Looking to the work of socially engaged artist activists, we explore their topics from different creative angles – mapping, interviewing and oral history practices, making collections and connections, photovoice and other creative action research strategies. Finally students are asked to take their learning, and propose an ‘action’ or way that they can connect that learning to the world.

This year, students took on questions about:

Restorative Justice in Schools

Restorative Justice in Classroom Practice

Teacher Wellness, and

Advocacy for Art Education

To share and extend their learning, each group created different resources to connect the new knowledge they learned with others to use in classrooms and communities: A restorative justice zine, a teacher wellness podcast, a restorative classroom tool, and advocacy tools to support principals and teachers in art education advocacy. This work, and the ItAG process encourages teachers to see themselves as not only creative thinkers and researchers, but also community activists able to work collaboratively towards necessary change.

Whiteboard with brainstorming about the topic of 'Research' Paper with brainstorming on it - 'Who are we in relation to our research?' Whiteboard with writing - Tactical / Strategic

Betty Yu Artist Talk

March 31, 2022 by je2190 Leave a Comment

Multimedia artist and educator Betty Yu shared her incredible work with NYU Art+Education students on Nov. 17th, including her personal work and collective efforts as a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade. After beginning with a land acknowledgement, Yu talked about her own family history and relationship to New York City. As an artist, Yu focuses on the use of digital and collective storytelling practices as a way to amplify the voices of those most impacted by housing injustice and gentrification, starting in Sunset Park, Brooklyn where she was raised. Her project, (Dis)Placed in Sunset Park is an interactive multimedia project that allows visitors to take a virtual tour of Sunset Park and experience the stories of Latinx and Chinese (im)migrants, workers and residents through short videos presented through an augmented reality technology (AR) app.

In addition to her own work, Yu is a member and co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade (a collective of Asian American social justice artists) that centers art and culture as a way to support community-led campaigns around issues of gentrification and displacement. In her talk, Yu described CAB’s collaborations with CAAV and the Chinatown Tenants Union, which included collecting oral histories, story circles, resident-led walks, photography, audio recordings, community counter mapping, and video documentation as well as large scale public projections, augmented reality, 3-D storytelling, geo-located audio walks, and interactive mapping. In all her projects, Yu describes her commitment to engaging community members in ‘placekeeping’ (rather than place making) and the power of technologies that support collective participation and amplification of voices impacted by the predatory practices of corporate investment and mass displacement in New York City.

Click here for a list of New Media Resources that include online resources, tools, and software to use in your practice.

The Pink Slip Project

February 9, 2022 by je2190 Leave a Comment

BIPOC students are disproportionately suspended in U.S. schools. During the pandemic, in-school suspensions have dipped while out of school suspensions have continued to steadily rise. Once school returns to in-person, students will continue to be unjustly punished in school. Ideally, school should be a place of learning and growth. Suspensions stand in the way of that goal, actively taking students away from their education and failing to provide them with the support they need to thrive.

A public performance in a park. People dressed in pink with a large bulletin board saying 'Suspended'

The Pink Slip Project: Avalon Kenny, Molly Rutledge, Mary Anderson, Zoe Stern

In an attempt to unveil the reality of this unjust system, The Pink Slip Project included a public performance/intervention using pink suspension slips and a QR code linking to online resources. This is participatory “installation” had multiple methods of engaging the public and encouraging reflection and action to address the inequities surrounding public school suspensions and their implementation. Bright pink slips made people curious about the information we were sharing and interested in participating. Passersby could sit in a typical school desk to fill out their own pink slips sharing a personal experience of school suspension or to learn more. Participants also helped identify alternatives for suspensions by writing ideas on the suspension slips and in chalk and used our desk installation to share their own stories. Throughout the day, each of the Pink Slip Project collaborators were talking to people about their stories and engaging in dialogue and advocacy for more just suspension methods including discussing restorative justice methods and other alternatives to suspension.

Image of a bulletin board with many pink slips attached to it. The top of the board says "Suspended" A detail of a 'pink slip' suspension card from the bulletin board

There is also a more anonymous and student led side of this project. Pink Slip Project collaborators worked with New York City high school students to create the materials for the installation and conducted a series of interviews and focus groups to archive their voices and experiences with suspension. These high school perspectives were integral to designing the public performance piece at Washington Square Park.

Screenshot of the project taken from Instagram. A woman sits at a school desk in front of a board that says 'Suspended' A Gif file includes 4 images of women dressed in pink sitting at a school desk in front of a bulletin board that says 'Suspended'

Image of posters that are on the ground. They include statistics and pie charts describing suspension rates in New York City

Summer 2021 Research and Final Projects

February 9, 2022 by je2190 Leave a Comment

A year into the Covid 19 Pandemic the Art+Education students had been working together remotely and this final project experience built from all the ways we had been experiencing the pandemic together at NYU and in New York City schools. This semester some of us were finally able to come together and learn in our NYU classroom together while others stayed remote. Despite the different ways we participated in our seminar sessions we looked at lots of socially engaged art projects, considered how interviewing and oral history could take artistic forms, did lots of library research and creative mapping together. Our group found a hybrid way to work together, but our research collectives organized themselves around those who were participating virtually and those who were in person. Eventually two groups formed to investigate different topics and engage people in learning with them.

The Pink Slip Project looked at the inequities surrounding suspensions in public schools and who are most disproportionately affected. Students created a public intervention in Washington Square Park to involve the public by collecting individual stories and sharing advocacy information to advocate for necessary change.

The Student Experience Collective focused on student knowledge and needs during a year of virtual learning in a pandemic and developed a website and creative strategies to learn how to better support students in the coming year.

Caryn Davidson: BLM in Schools and What We Believe

November 30, 2020 by je2190 Leave a Comment

Caryn Davidson teaches visual art at Millennium High School in Brooklyn, NY. She is an active member of the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE) and facilitated one of the 2019 Inquiry to Action (ItAG) groups: NYCORE Creates!

Caryn is a long time organizer and NYC steering committee member of the Black Lives Matter in Schools movement and worked on the Year of Purpose website.

She also illustrated What We Believe: A Black Lives Matter Principles Activity Book for middle and high school students, which was written by educator Laleña Garcia. The book is published by Lee and Low Books and includes quotes, interview excerpts, poetry and other text and extension activities to support youth exploration of BLM principles.

Alexis Lambrou – Photo Requests from Solitary

November 30, 2020 by je2190 Leave a Comment

Alexis Lambrou used Photo Requests from Solitary (PRFS) in a digital photography cirriculum with students at Bard High School.

PRFS is a participatory project that invites men and women held in long-term solitary confinement in U.S. prisons to request a photograph of anything at all, real or imagined, and then finds a volunteer to make the image. The astonishing range of requests, taken together, provide an archive of the hopes, memories, and interests of people who live in extreme isolation.

This unit harnessed technology in the classroom by using Google Cardboard and The Guardian’s 6×9 VR experience. Students were ‘placed’ in a prison cell as they listened to six men and one woman share their experiences of solitary confinement.

The cirriculum ended in an exhibition that featured student work, the requests from men and women in solitary confinement and students’ personal reflections and stories around incarceration.

Learn more about the project: http://photorequestsfromsolitary.org/

students using VR technology in class

photography compostion of a headless body in a pray pose reflected in a cracked window

photography composition of 4 girls on the stoop of a house

photos and description on a wall during an exhibition

Assembly with Shaun Leonardo and peer leaders from The Brooklyn Justice Initiative

October 27, 2020 by je2190 Leave a Comment

On April 19, 2018 artist and Assembly lead educator Shaun Leonardo, along with members of the program’s peer leadership group led a participatory presentation informed by the Assembly curriculum and co-curated by our collaborators. Assembly is at once a public storefront gallery and an artist-led diversion program for court-involved youth in partnership with Brooklyn Justice Initiatives. Assembly seeks to dismantle the dominant narratives of the “criminal” through a series of workshops designed by artists Melanie Crean, Sable Smith and Shaun Leonardo, in collaboration with individuals who are court-involved, formerly incarcerated, or otherwise affected by the criminal justice system. Through a curriculum based on visual storytelling, participants translate personal narratives into performance in order to replace a culturally embedded conception of criminality with new language so that the mind and body may think, feel, and move in a way not defined by their previous experience with arrest and incarceration. For more information, see the Assembly website: Recess – Assembly

AssemblyArtEdColloquium2018Flyer