Nearly 100 arts supporters turned out to celebrate the importance of art education and to honor Youth in Arts’ wonderful Executive Director Miko Lee on Sept. 13 at the YIA Gallery in the Downtown San Rafael Arts District.

Lee has been a tenacious advocate for ensuring that all children – not just those at Marin’s wealthier schools – have equal access to the arts. She is leaving Youth in Arts after 13 years at the helm.

“We know we have a big equity gap in Marin, ” Lee told the enthusiastic crowd at the State of the Arts event. “We feel that as part of the ARTS NOW Marin (California Alliance for Arts Education) community, arts education makes a difference. ”

In reviewing the year’s accomplishments, Lee highlighted the passage of Marin’s first ever Arts Education Plan a year ago, which was folded into the larger county arts plan. With that strong foundation, Marin County Office of Education and Youth in Arts were able to get $500,000 in additional funding for arts education so that more students of color and students with disabilities were reached.

Youth in Arts also partnered with other experts in the field to train nearly 100 educators at a STEAM workshop this summer.

“One hundred percent of those teachers said they could feel confident integrating arts into their curriculum,” Lee said. “They saw that this is a way to reach our students who are not being listened to and not being heard.”

Youth in Arts has also produced a Digital Toolkit, six videos on inclusive teaching practices for artists, classroom teachers and parents. In addition, Youth in Arts has developed a free ARTS Bank. The database, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, allows educators, parents and students to plug in an IEP goal or grade level and get an arts activity that matches.

Youth in Arts’ award-wining youth a cappella group, ‘Til Dawn, also performed.  This past year, those students received 350 hours of arts learning and performing. The event also coincided with San Rafael’s  2nd Friday Art Walk .

Board member Melissa Jones-Briggs served as the MC. Speakers at the event included Mary Jane Burke, Marin County superintendent of schools; Gabriella Calicchio, director of cultural services for Marin County; Pepe Gonzalez, principal of Laurel Dell and Short Elementary schools; Danielle O’Leary, economic development director for San Rafael, Naomi Tamura, Youth in Arts’ board president; and Dr. Tom Peters, president and CEO of the Marin Community Foundation.

Gonzalez spoke passionately about the difference Lee has made through her vision, passion and energy. He pointed to photographs in the YIA gallery of young artists with special needs and said he wasn’t surprised to see them there.

“If it wasn’t for Miko and the programs she’s brought in, they wouldn’t be up there right now,” he said.

Gonzalez also pointed to the photo of a third grader at Laurel Dell who had been through Youth in Arts programs.

The young artist has been in the U.S. only two years. Her academic grades only tell part of her story, he said, noting the joy on her face while making art.

“When you give kids access to something that finds that inner voice, that right there is exactly what we want our kids to be like,” Gonzalez said. “Those smiles are real. The programs, the vision, everything that (Miko) believes in … that smile says it all.”

Please consider a donation in honor of Miko Lee’s incredible legacy, and to support the important work that we do.

Thanks to photographers Kathleen Gaines/MarinArts, Lynn Noyce, Kim Wilson and Youth in Arts staff.

Mentor Artist Tracy Eastman worked with Olive Elementary students through Youth in Arts’ Arts Unite Us residency program.  Tracy says of her time: “I absolutely enjoyed teaching these two Visual Arts classes at Olive Elementary!”

Throughout the residency program, students worked on recognizing and understanding emotions, material exploration, and collaboration. In a special project called “Empathy Portraits”, Each student was given a standing mirror to look at themselves while they made various facial expressions. We would evaluate what our faces looked like discussed some of the possible emotions these expressions could signal, noticing what shapes our eyes, nose, mouth and even eyebrows make with that expression. All of the students really responded to this project, and in sharing facial expressions together, we were abel to connect with what emotion could look like on our own faces as well as those of our peers. This activity helped participants connect with their own reflections, which can be a big request for many students.

In subsequent classes, students worked with materials such as tempera paints using tempera watercolor cakes. In order to engage everyone, we used tools used of varying sized paint brushes and Q-tips. This project focused on color mixing and experimentation with lines, dots, and blending. The canvas board lent itself well to the students that tend to use a lot of pressure or rework one area of the painting many times. The Q-tips were a great adaptive tool for creating dots and small marks, and also bend and broke if the student used too much pressure, encouraging students to regulate their use of force. One of the classes had additional time for their paintings and so added colored pencil into the wet paint to see what would happen. Additional projects revolved around experimental application processes, such as the “Wandering Ink Painting” activity in which we applied ink on a water-treated paper surface and blew the ink around the canvas in order to create patterns.

We completed the residencies with a collaborative “Tape-Resist Tempera Stick Painting”, and tissue-paper landscapes inspired by gardens.

How can you develop a classroom that inspires students to be confident, compassionate, and creative? Special Day Classroom teachers from across the county spent the day with Youth in Arts exploring adaptive painting tools, learning to make accordion books from recycled file folders,  practicing the Brain Dance in countless ways, looking at learning styles through the lens of strength, and Making Learning Visible and more.

Of course we moved, as we explored the brain dance, embodying vocabulary words, strategies for engaging reluctant participants, and even engaging the brain through doodling.

Making Learning Visible (from Harvard’s Project Zero) is a great way to visualize learning, understanding, and next steps.

Gallery Walks (on any subject or body of work) encourage thoughtfulness, deeper thinking, reflection, and patience.

Through the California Department of Education’s Student Support and Academic Enrichment (SSAE) grant that the Marin County Office of Education received, Youth in Arts was in multiple Special Day Classes this spring.

Catherine Layton

Catherine Layton is a Marketing Manager by day, but her true passion is dance, specifically Tango. She has spent years honing her skill and performing in New York and throughout the Bay Area. Her deep appreciation for the arts, culled with her marketing superpower, and being the mother of two school-aged children, make her an ideal fit for the board.

Catherine is a recent graduate of the San Rafael Leadership Institute. Executive Director Miko Lee spoke at their Diversity, the Arts & Media session and Catherine was inspired, “Miko’s general energy, personal story, passion for the transformative nature of the arts in general, and for the work of YIA in particular, really struck a chord with me and inspired me to become involved. Plus, I’ve always been pro-arts and a supporter of arts in schools, and have two school-aged children, so I already had a passion for the cause –  it felt like a natural fit.”

Born in England and raised by two classical musicians, Catherine was exposed to the performing arts at an early age. Her arts education growing up in England and then Ohio was rather limited. “I spent half of my K-12 education in England, and only remember music class in school there. I only vaguely remember music and art in K-12 in Ohio,” she explains. “Most of my arts education occurred outside the classroom, and exposure to the arts in general came from my parents. It really wasn’t until I was in college that I had good access to arts education in all forms, and was able to choose from many classes in the arts.” She wishes educational leaders would have had a better understanding of the importance of arts education, “as a critical part of a “well-rounded” curriculum, and really understood the profound benefits of arts in schools. That artistic expression and talent were nurtured in all schools (not just creative and performing arts schools), and that there were options for dance!”

Catherine looks forward to utilizing her skills in, “problem solving, collaboration, strategic thinking, marketing, project management and operational experience” to further the mission of Youth in Arts. We are so thankful to have her passion and expertise on our board. Thank you Catherine!

Mentor Artist Tracy Eastman says of her Arts Unite Us Residency at San Jose Middle School: “The students explored art in very creative ways!”

“Texture Collage Boards” —  Our first class project was all about textures. Each student was given contact paper with the adhesive side up (secured to white foam board) and choices of textured materials to add. We discussed what the materials felt like and described the feeling it gave, (i.e. soft, bumpy, rough, smooth, noisy/crunchy, hard, etc.). We then took oil pastels and drew across many of the textures. As the last step, we covered the remaining sticky areas with magic gold transfer foil. Some of the classes removed the white foam board from the back of the artwork and displayed them in the window, while others left them with the white background and hung them on the wall.

Our second class project was making stained glass window kites, which focused on creating shapes, working within borders and cutting with scissors. The students were given the same set up of contact paper placed on a white foam board, but with different instructions. Each student was given four strips of black construction paper to create a diamond shape on their contact paper and were given additional strips to add anywhere within the diamond’s borders. Within the spaces of the black strips, the students placed square pieces of colored and patterned tissue paper to further decorate their kites. The students then smoothed on a top layer of contact paper to seal the pieces in place and then cut them out, staying on the outside of the black diamond borders. Most students needed assistance and/or adaptive scissors, which were provided by the classroom teachers. Lastly, the students taped a yarn tail with a tissue paper bow to complete their kites. All of the students held up their kites and pretended to fly them around the room before they were hung in the windows.

During this residency program, we also focused on creating various marks on watercolor paper with tempera watercolor cakes and an array of adaptive tools. The tools ranged from paint brushes with variously shaped handles, sponges, roller sponges, silicone stamps, etc. Prior to adding paint with the adaptive tools, the students drew on their paper with oil pastels to create resistance artwork. Together, we talked about oil and water resist each other and how the oil will fight with the watercolor to show through. The students improvised on making marks with different parts of each tool. One student even used the foam roller as a hammer and made small circles on his page. We used these skills to work on three-dimensional and two-dimensional projects throughout the residency.

These programs were made possible with support from the following sources: