Developing Our Activist Voices

Today, teams of youth artists enter a critical moment of their Summer Leadership Institute: they begin the process of fabrication for seven murals across New York City. They excitedly gear up to prime walls, lay down grid lines to guide them, sketch out designs on massive scales, and prepare a rainbow of color palettes at each site.
 
These steps represent the beginnings of a mural on a wall, as well as the close to three weeks of intensive team-building, research, design, and social justice education.
 
Join us in our vision for change this Wednesday and Thursday, during our Community Painting Days. This opportunity invites community members to come paint with our SLI youth to positively transform communities through art-making. 
 
As part of Groundswell’s flagship program, SLI youth joined teaching artists and community partners to inspire collective impact through art. To do so, the youth delved into the process of collective art-making. The teams visited museums to revisit art canonical trends, such as the Vision Zero team visiting the Museum of Modern Art while a team at East Brooklyn Community High School went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In addition to museum trips, all groups held interviews at multiple locations to discover a fuller range of perspectives.
 
While the Groundswell process follows a similar form across all our murals, no experience was exactly alike. The Voices Her’d young women, for example, went to Times Square to observe how culture promotes gender-based violence, while youth in the Bronx used speedometers to test speeds of passing cars to learn about how to stop DWIs. The “Transform/Restore: Brownsville” team did neither; they instead held interviews with Brownsville community members in the tradition of the People’s Art practice.
 
The conversations between different community members often gave youth opportunities to reflect on what they believe. Making His’tory’s conversation with the 90th Precinct gave them another lens to understand their mural topic: the complex relationship between police and young men of color. The team at PS 15 developed their public speaking during a design share at Orchard Valley Garden.
 
The sheer variation for the SLI seven teams illustrates the care and specificity of advocating for change. Groundswell youth will not only become activist artists this summer, they become ambassadors for their issues, ready to embody art as a tool for social change.
 
The past three weeks grounded Groundswell youth in a framework of art creating community, and community creating change. The final designs for the murals reflect their passion, with the artists describing the youth’s concepts with powerful words as gripping, beacons of hope, personal, bright, bold, and representative of a figure in “a critical moment in time.”
 
The language of a critical moment captures the energy of this first week of fabrication, as Groundswell youth make their developing activist voices heard across seven walls across the city.