Session 1
Saturday March 20, 4pm–6pm EST
Photoville Educator Lab Spring 2021
Creating with Community
**Each session will feature different artists and cover different topics, so we encourage you to attend both sessions.
Explore projects and methods to inspire your students to create art that is collaborative and community-based. How can photography be done in, and with, community? In what ways might the role of the “artist” be expanded? How might it be used to build meaningful relationships, and to reveal stories about our society? How has community engagement been done during the pandemic?
This Educator Lab will take place across two sessions, during which you will hear from working artists and young people who practice photography in this way. You will also collaborate with other educators to workshop ideas on how to practice community-engaged art with your students.
Featuring: Sol Aramendi (Project Luz); Alyssa Garcia (Las Fotos Project); Glo Jackson (Spectrum: Diversity within the disabled community); Tonika Johnson (Folded Map Project); Zac Martin and Jasmin Chang (Community Heroes).
Photoville Educator Labs are professional development workshops for educators to be inspired, connect and collaborate on ways to bring visual storytelling into the classroom. The program is free and open to educators of all subjects and of all ages, but the content will be focused on middle school and high school art teachers working in the DOE and in community programs.
Photoville Educator Labs are produced in partnership with PhotoWings.
Saturday March 20, 4pm–6pm EST
Session 1 Featured Artists
Spectrum: Diversity within the disabled community
What does intersectionality mean to you?
Glo Jackson
Glo Jackson (they/them) is a senior at the Henry Viscardi School who became interested in photography when they received their first professional camera for their sixteenth birthday. Photography is one of their favorite art mediums. They are also passionate about musical theatre, reading, and creating a change in the world through multifaceted activism. They want to showcase their life and community within their art.
Community Heroes
How can your community bring their strengths and knowledge together to work on an art project?
Jasmin Chang
Jasmin Chang is Deputy Director of Community & Education at Photoville, where she produces teen and teacher programs, as well as The FENCE and other Photoville projects. She is an artist and organizer who loves building projects that connect people through art and storytelling. She is co-founder of Community Heroes, a neighborhood-based public art project. She is currently working on the Winston-Salem Portrait Project, a photographic and sculptural portrayal of the community.
Zac Martin
Husband, father, community and youth organizer, activist, and pastor, Zac Martin is the executive director and lead organizer at Trellis Community Development, a community development non-profit that helps neighborhoods address injustice through building and maintaining collaboration around advocacy and action. Zac is also the pastor of justice at Recovery House of Worship in Downtown Brooklyn.
Thursday March 25, 4pm–6pm EST
Session 2 Featured Artists
Project Luz
What are the social justice issues in your community? Are we listening?
Sol Aramendi
Sol Aramendi is a socially engaged artist working with immigrant communities throughout New York City. Her participatory practice promotes change around fairer labor and immigration conditions. She is the founder of Project Luz, a nomadic program that uses photography and art as a tool of empowerment. She is a 2018 Open Society Foundations Moving Walls fellow and also received fellowships from A Blade of Grass (2015), the Ford Foundation (2018), and NALAC. (2018).
Tonika Johnson
Tonika Johnson is a visual artist and photographer from Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood who explores urban segregation and documents the nuance and richness of the Black community. She was featured in Chicago Magazine as a 2017 Chicagoan of the Year. Her Englewood-based photography projects From the INside and Everyday Rituals were exhibited at Rootwork Gallery in Pilsen, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Harold Washington Library Center, and at Loyola University’s Museum of Art (LUMA). Her current ongoing project, Folded Map, was also exhibited at LUMA (2018). Most recently, she was named one of Field Foundation’s 2019 Leaders for a New Chicago.
Las Fotos Project
How are you reminding youth of their agency and committing to learning from them?
Alyssa Garcia
The oldest daughter of a Mexican immigrant and Boyle Heights native, Alyssa M. Garcia, is an integrative artist and educator with over 10 years of experience in the classroom. She is the current Director of Education and Programming at Las Fotos Project, a photography mentoring organization that works to elevate the voices of female-identifying teenagers from communities of color through photography and mentoring, empowering them to channel their creativity for the benefit of themselves, their community, and future careers.