In Summer 2019, a group of a group of nine people – including seven who identify as white and two as LatinX formed an artist educator collective to address a sense of frustration and anger with the white supremacy that orients public education, as well as a sense of hope for enacting a consciously anti-racist and anti-oppressive teaching practice in art classrooms in New York City.
We spent many hours together in Room 403 of the Barney Building on NYU campus, discussing, drawing, mapping, creating collections, and building ideas and commitments towards socially just art education together. We read about how schools are racialized spaces that foreground white bodies, we mapped our own histories of education in relation to whiteness and privilege, we shared new commitments and values based on the books that we were reading and the titles that held us accountable to new ways of being in the classroom.
A field trip to the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, gave us a chance to research examples of manifestos from different social movements, play a radical un-Monopoly game, and talk with the volunteer radical archivists who make Interference Archive such an amazing resource for social movements.
The end result of our collective research and negotiations together was a manifesto of 10 commitments that we made to each other as anti-racist art educators and to our future students. We created a website to invite other artist educators to share their experiences working in schools and involve them in these commitments. We imagined each commitment as a visual poster that would hang in our classrooms to remind us of the work that is required every day.
“We are a collective of passionate and radical New York City based artist educators working in PreK-12 schools who are fed up with an educational system that perpetuates racism, inequality, and complacency. We commit to challenging this system through art + education. Art has always been a powerful force, one that helps us re-imagine ourselves and the world around us.”
