The Los Angeles based artists featured in this ongoing series weave together art, education, and public space in our city in order to create meaningful dialogue and change. Through their guiding inspiration, individual aesthetic, professional practices, and personal choices, the artists have impacted not only my personal trajectory in art, but also my vision, and reach as an educator.

I am deeply interested in where we are going as a community of educators and artists. In my eyes, this group of individuals featured are the future in the present. They are shaping conversations that envision and inspire a new dialogue for the future of education and cultural production – and they are doing it now. In many ways, the artists and their work represent not only the voices I wish I had access to while in art school, but also now coalesce in my imagination as the source of knowledge that is formative to our future. These artists and educators are the university faculty that should be – and that will be – and that are. This is not a gentrification lab. It is the opposite of that. It is the corpus that elevates transformative influence.

The series includes interviews of the artists and the strategies they used to find inspiration and community as they were developing their form of expression, and how they speak to that in their work, teaching, and life today.