Students from Starting Artists

When I was 16 years old I desperately wanted to do something—something to express myself, something to make a difference. For me, that something became a fundraising calendar that I conceived of and photographed as a high school student and then again as a college student. I photographed portraits of internationally adopted children, worked with graphic designers to put them into a calendar and then sold the results to family, friends, teachers, community members and later at Barnes & Noble. The two calendars raised thousands of dollars to benefit international orphanages, including the Colombian orphanage I was adopted from at the age of three.

This project taught me that I could use both creativity and entrepreneurship to positively affect the world. Today, this is what I teach my students at Starting Artists, Inc. (SA). I founded SA in 2006 as a graduate student in the Program in Arts Administration at Columbia University Teachers College. I wanted to create a place where young people could use media arts and business skills to be just as artistic and innovative as I was at their age.

During the SA Afterschool Program, students learn the professional tools to make a statement—a statement about their lives, a statement about their communities, and a statement about their world. Through classes in photography, graphic design, printmaking, crafts, mixed media, video, animation, music mixing, and entrepreneurship students transform from passive media consumers into active media producers and catalysts for change.

We created the Why Art Matters video during last year's Afterschool Program. First, students brainstormed words that described what art means to them. The prompt was, "Art is..." and the students answered it with words such as "loud," "inspiration," and "global." Then, we paired those words with some of their opposites and compliments. Students chose snapshots that I had taken around New York City, matching them with appropriate words and then adding the type in Photoshop. Quon, an SA intern, mixed the soundtrack in GarageBand and then we put all of the images together in iMovie.

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I believe there are teachable moments every single day. The Why Art Matters video contest was an excellent way for the Starting Artists community to engage in a discussion of why we do what we do, not just how. From the video you can see why art matters to me and to my students.

For us, art is everywhere and everything.

www.startingartists.org

As the winner of the Why Arts Matter video contest, Starting Artists' video will appear in Times Square on MTV's 44.5 HD big screen, October 25-31.