Lead Teaching Artist: Kamau Pattan
Assistant Teaching Artist: Tibora Bea Girczyc-Blum
Program Intern: Gloria Reyes
AIE Program Manager: Tara Foley
Community Partners: Columbia Park Boys & Girls Club, Jewish Vocational Services (JVS), and Making Waves
Youth Advisory Board Members: Essence Alexander, Constance Castillo, Betsy Espinoza, Nathaniel Francis, Nathaniel Galipeau, Kate Gamble, Javier Gutierrez , Daniel Lemus, Isabel Leonard, Diego Luna, Bryan Marciano John Micheal, Alejandro Mis-Caviah, James Orellana, Byron Ramos, Olivia Sheehan, and Lucy Thurpp.

This semester, SoEx teaching artists, Youth Advisory Board (YAB) members and Community Partners work in SoEx’s 14th Street back gallery classroom. YAB delves into the cultural identity of the individual student and how identity can be expressed through different multimedia art practices. YAB asks the question: how can art, within the parameters of collaborative arts practice, documentation, digital communications, video, sound, photography, self exploration, painting and drawing, help sustain the viability and presence of ones cultural background? Essential to this is an investigation of the tools and theories relating to immigration and anthropology. YAB explores a variety of media that inform and contradict conversations about cultural backgrounds, traditions and identities by looking at the development of digital communications, such as, blogs, myspace, youtube, advertisements and television.

While simultaneously looking into the future and the past, the studio project for the semester consists of executing a multimedia conversation regarding young identities and futuristic projects within a cultural context. YAB presents their final project in conjunction with SoEx’s exciting inaugural exhibition at our new location on 20th Street.