Summer Art & Advocacy Youth Fellowship

Guiding Questions
What are the human and more-than-human relationships that comprise the ecology of Northeast LA? What are the histories of these relationships and what possible futures might exist for them?

Week 1 of Clockshop’s Inaugural Summer Arts & Advocacy Youth Fellowship focused on (re)acclimating fellows to the areas where they will be spending the duration of the program – in and around the Los Angeles River. Fellows met with local artists and activists Lazaro Arvizu Jr. and Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. Both Lazaro and Eddie shared their approaches to making and using art—approaches informed by their identities and experiences with indigeneity, migration, and community. Fellows also deepened their knowledge of the ecology of Northeast Los Angeles through workshops led by local partners, covering topics including community science, naturalist interpretation, and urban kayaking.

Guiding Questions
How might we stretch our understanding of what art looks like and can do? How might art either entrench or disrupt dominant place narratives or stories?  What role can art and stories play in inviting new kinds of relationships between people and place?

Week 2 fellows worked with artists and storytellers to explore the role art and story can play in challenging and/or disrupting dominant narratives about places, and exploring the ways art can build and maintain community. Fellows took part in three multi-day workshops. The first workshop was a deep dive into Oral History led by Darío Herrera as part of Clockshop’s Take Me To Your River project. Fellows learned how to listen closely and shared place-based stories with peers. The next workshop, led by artist Rosten Woo, tasked fellows with capturing their relationship to a meaningful place (Lewis McAdams Riverfront Park and the Los Angeles River) through a series of photographs. Rosten challenged the fellows to recontextualize these images with creative captions that changed the way a viewer might interact with or understand what was depicted. Later in the week, fellows worked with Andres Cortes, an artist from Northeast Los Angeles, and collaboratively constructed a mosaic mural of expressive self portraits with donated tiles/ceramics.

Guiding Questions
How do decisions get made about land in Northeast LA? What are the different ways through which people can work toward socioecological transformation?

Week 3 During the third week of the fellowship, through research, field trips, and conversations, the fellows explored the wide range of approaches that people, organizations, and institutions can take to affect social and ecological change. To kick off the week, fellows worked in small groups to research and present to their peers the stories of public space advocacy that led to three public green spaces in Los Angeles. The next day, they had the opportunity to meet many of the figures involved in these fights, from student organizers who won the fight to turn railyards downtown and in Cypress Park into park space, to the California State Parks officials who partnered with those community members to push for a new, urban-focused direction for the agency. The fellows also embarked on field trips into the community. They visited the Los Angeles River Integrated Design Lab where they learned about and participated in new approaches to community engagement around urban design, and they joined the organizers at LA-Más to hear about community-led mutual aid efforts in Northeast LA. The week concluded with a theater of the oppressed workshop, during which fellows learned about the methodology of Agosto Boal and participated in theater games, and a forum theater exercise where they used acting to explore and intervene in issues of gentrification in Northeast LA.

Guiding Question
What are we uniquely positioned to do given our knowledge, experience, and identities?

During the fourth week of the program fellows wrapped up projects from earlier this summer, attended various field trips, and began to plan their culminating event. This week, fellows added the final details to the mosaic mural they worked on during Week 2 of the Fellowship with artist Andres Cortes. Fellows took pride in the fact that they accomplished a huge art piece in such a short amount of time. Fellows also visited Luis Rincon, who they met during Week 3, at Los Angeles State Historic Park, and learned more about the history of the park and how it is sustained. 

The last field trip of the week gave fellows the opportunity to speak with Eunisses Hernandez, City Council Member for District 1 of Los Angeles, at Los Angeles City Hall. They chatted with the Councilmember about her path into politics, her vision for District 1 moving forward, and how she sustains herself in order to continue her work. Following their time with Councilmember Hernandez, they took a brief tour of City Hall before heading back to the Cypress Park Clubhouse to continue planning their final event. As they planned their event, fellows drew from their experiences and knowledge they’ve gained throughout the Summer Youth Fellowship to consider what issues in Northeast Los Angeles they felt most urgently about: environmental justice, the power of art and story to change narratives about places, tenants rights, and mutual aid. Through these discussions, fellows reimagined what Northeast Los Angeles could be if they had the opportunity to share what they learned. They took all the ideas they had and put them together for their event – “Voices of NELA: Advocacy Fair.”

Guiding Question
How can we share our skills and knowledge with our community?

In the program’s fifth week, fellows worked toward their final event, Voices of NELA: Advocacy Fair, with laser focus. The twelve fellows broke into four groups, each responsible for a piece of the larger event. One group focused on housing justice and created a compelling infographic educating tenants on their rights, and designed a life-size board game for guests to play, complete with true/false questions about tenancy law in California. A second group put together a community closet, with the slogan “Give what you can, Take what you need,” and developed a pamphlet about mutual aid to hand to folks who stopped by. The third group developed a table where visitors could learn about the benefits of native southern California plants, and spent the week writing up informative handouts and preparing “seed capsules” and a native seed planting station. The final group put together a table whose goal was to change stereotypical narratives about Northeast LA through creative mapmaking (or “counter-mapping”; see week 1 description for more). They created a large-scale map of the area for people to add onto during the event, a personal map-making station, and a gallery of the fellows’ own mapping projects, which they worked on throughout the summer.

The fellows were also responsible for doing outreach (vibrant flyers posted around their neighborhoods), planning the music (a joyful, mariachi-heavy playlist), organizing catering (pupusas from El Majajual and aguas frescas made by the fellows’ families), and decorating the space (strings of handmade papel picado). The event was attended by over one hundred people, including the fellows’ families and teachers, Youth Fellowship workshop leaders, Clockshop’s neighbors, and other friends and community members. 

Leading up to the final event, the fellows were treated to a celebratory lunch, and shed more than a few tears reflecting on the community they’d built and the growth they’d witnessed in themselves and each other.