Sign up now for the Where Art Lives program
We are looking for classes of adolescents in San Francisco who would like to have visits from a practicing professional artist and be a part of a city-wide discussion about art and community.
About Where Art Lives
San Francisco spends over 20 million dollars a year cleaning up and dealing with graffiti vandalism. Small business and property owners are constantly having to repaint their walls. Public art and beloved murals are also getting tagged. Countless hours of artistic energy are being squandered.
As part of their response to this problem, the Department of Public Works and the San Francisco Arts Commission created the Where Art Lives program to engage the youth who will be the future leaders and business owners of our city. For several years now, experienced artists have been visiting students in 4th-6th grades to teach art skills and discuss the difference between public art and illegal vandalism (spoiler alert: the answer is permission). Watch the film and get excited!
This year, we’ve got grand plans. Participating students will be part of a larger project to collectively envision how San Francisco will look when today’s adolescents are running things. What images would they like to see on the walls in their neighborhoods?
Bring Where Art Lives to your students
You have:
- A 4th or 5th grade elementary school class,
- A middle school art, leadership, STEAM, or other elective class, OR
- An after school program serving youth in grades 4-8, that can help ensure the consistent attendance of 8-15 students over four sessions.
Students will:
- Learn skills from an experienced, professional teaching artist for four sessions,
- Be provided with all necessary art supplies for classroom use,
- Imagine their own future business and decide how they will decorate their walls,
- Spend time creatively considering how they can improve their city,
- See their own art and ideas as part of a larger discussion.
We will do our best to coordinate with teachers to incorporate the Where Art Lives lesson plan with your curriculum and your students’ learning goals.
Partner with Where Art Lives
You have:
- A group of youth of any age, but especially high school or transitional age youth, who have been learning certain creative skills or have been working together to improve their community in an after school program or in a project-focused high school class.
Your group is interested in partnering with the Where Art Lives project at any of the following stages:
- Surveying and documenting public art and graffiti vandalism in San Francisco neighborhoods.
- Evaluating the effect that different art and vandalism has on the people who see it.
- Creatively considering the question, “How should we decorate the walls of our city?” Students could use whatever art form they are interested in.
- Collecting, curating, and compiling the ideas of other students in the Where Art Lives program. This could take the form of a digital collage incorporating other students’ drawings, a blog high-lighting the most interesting ideas, an in-person art show of other students’ art, etc…
- Documenting the whole program. For instance, students at Sunset Youth Services created a video documenting the spring 2014 Where Art Lives program.
We can provide material resources depending on the nature of the partnership
Independently participate
Anyone, even adults, can participate in this discussion. Imagine you own a small business in San Francisco. How would you paint your wall to best benefit the people in your community?
Contact Todd for worksheets so you can participate – or just upload your ideas on social media and tag it #whereartlives.