ARTS AVENUE IS A PROGRAM BY ARTS CONNECTION -
THE ARTS COUNCIL OF SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY INSTILLING CREATIVE CONFIDENCE IN OUR COUNTY’S K-12 YOUTH
ARTS Avenue, previously known as After School Artist In Residency (AIR) Program, is an after school program which provides free arts and culture workshops to youth K-12. Our workshops include a variety of different disciplines, such as painting, drawing, ceramics, photography, dance, creative writing, music, and more! Arts Connection works with local professional artists to provide rewarding cultural experiences to students at multiple school sites.
Since February 2022, we have been working closely with the San Bernardino City Unified School District’s afterschool program, Expanded Learning, to provide arts and culture classes led by Community Teaching Artists to a select number of school sites each year. With the additional grant support from Inland Empire Community Foundation, ARTS Avenue is able to provide classes and supplies to students for free!
Arts Connection believes arts education is a vital component of youth and community development and civic life, and we are proud to work with our district partners to bring high quality arts education programming to our community. ARTS Avenue programming not only supports arts education for our youth; our program also provides a vital career pathway for local artists and culture bearers interested in learning to teach. Though the skill levels of our current and past Community Teaching Artists have ranged from new to experienced educators, our Community Teaching Artist Training Series provides all our teaching artists with the training, curriculum, and mentoring needed to be successful in our program. Many of our Community Teaching Artists have pursued other teaching opportunities after working in our program – and several of them have been inspired to return to college to pursue formal K-12 credentialing in arts education.
Arts Connection’s goal for ARTS Avenue is to expand its programming to all San Bernardino City Unified School District schools so that all students have access to the program. We are committed to providing a safe space for youth to expand their confidence, build their creative skills, express themselves, and cultivate their voice in the community through art.
OUR STORY
Our program began in February of 2022, we offered our services to 4 schools sites with one Teaching Artist per site. We offered disciplines such as dance, drawing, photography, and poetry. By the end of the 2021-22 school year, we offered ceramics, dance, drawing, journal making, photography, and poetry with the same 4 schools adding two Teaching Artists per school.
We received a lot of positive feedback and were asked to work at 13 more schools for the 2022-23 school year. We also had the chance to work at 3 different high schools which was an age group we hadn’t offered our services to yet. With this we were able to bring on 15 Teaching Artists for the year who each taught their own disciplines ranging from painting and drawing to music composition and printmaking. Teachers were ecstatic with the amount of interest they received from the students. A number of students continued to participate in all of the art workshops throughout the school year.
This year we have the honor of returning to the previous 4 schools along with expanding to a few new schools. We will be bringing in new disciplines such as screen printing, comic making and illustration and videography.
OUR IMPACT
Over the past year, Arts Connection offered arts and culture classes to a total of 17 schools!
Our Community Teaching Artists & Culture Bearers have taught over 700 students, and Arts Connection has hosted two student art exhibitions since beginning the program in 2022.
Our program has also trained 18 Community Teaching Artists in social-emotional learning, classroom management, curriculum development, and more, preparing them for the classroom as well as exciting careers in arts education.
If you are interested in having Arts Avenue at your school, please contact our Arts Education Program Supervisor Andrea ‘Dre’ Bonales at dre@artsconnectionnetwork.org
