Laurel Butler <lbutler@ybca.

org>

5/21/13

to Andrea, Evan, Amie, adrienneskye, Carrie, C, Jova, Freddy Hi everyone, So delighted and honored and excited and grateful to see you all here at YBCA tomorrow morning. There will be brunchy things and vegan things and markers and giant post-its and big vision. Some reminders:

Please arrive by 10:00 am and enter through our Loading Dock Entrance at 130 3rd Street You can buzz yourself in, and a Security Guard will escort you upstairs to the Young Artists Studio Please bring the following two things to share with the group:

1. Resources (online or hard copy, text or digital media) that might offer appropriate pointsof-entry for youth to engage with the concept of the PIC. (I know it will be challenging, but let's try to limit ourselves to 2 or 3?) 2. Activities or exercises that you yourself have found successful in creative community work around this theme, and could facilitate with a diverse group of 25-30 teens, AND/OR an idea for an activity/exercise that you would like to try.

Finally: Please bring your schedules/calendars. The YBCA YAAW Summer Intensive will take place July 22nd through August 15th, Monday through Thursday, 12:00 to 4:30 pm. Each Think Tank participant is invited to facilitate up to four hours of the Summer Intensive, alone or in collaboration with another team member. Our teaching artist fee is $75/hour, with up to $100 in reimbursable supply funds.

We would like to scaffold the Summer Intensive so that the pedagogy builds on itself, while also making sure that there are times and dates that work for each facilitator. Lets see if we can
arrive at an outline for the four weeks that feels like a structured, broad and comprehensive introduction to the work. My cell is 303-847-5679 if anyone needs to get ahold of me in the morning hours. All my best to you, and see you then, -Laurel

Hi everyone, Thank you so much for your responses and flexibility around scheduling - you made it easier than I expected. Our first-ever YBCA Young Artists at Work Curriculum Development Think Tank will take place:

Wednesday, May 22nd 10:00 - 12:00 am ...in the YBCA Young Artists Studio

What now?? 1. Please reply to this email to confirm your attendance! 2. The morning of the 22nd, please enter through our Loading Dock Entrance at 130 3rd Street - you can buzz yourself in, and a Security Guard will escort you upstairs to the Young Artists Studio if you don't already know where it's located (It is also sometimes called the YAAW Lounge). 3. We would love to feed you, so please let me know what might nourish your mind and body at that time of day. Brunchy things? Sushi? Fruits and chocolates? Caffeine? 4. Please bring the following two things to share with the group:

Resources (online or hard copy, text or digital media) that might offer appropriate pointsof-entry for youth to engage with the concept of the PIC Activities or exercises that you yourself have found successful in creative community work around this theme, and could facilitate with a diverse group of 25-30 teens, OR and idea for an activity/exercise that you would like to try. The resources and activities can be related, but don't have to be. Our objective is to collectively pool our creative knowledge to structure and scaffold a four-week curriculum that uses multidisciplinary arts practices as pedagogical modes of engagement to examine the complex matrix of oppressions that collude to perpetuate mass incarceration in America, and begin to theorize strategies for intervention, change, and liberation. Please don't hesitate to contact me with questions, insights, excitements, opportunities etc. Really looking forward to it. With much respect, Laurel

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 3:24 PM, Laurel Butler <lbutler@ybca.org> wrote:

Dear colleagues, friends, comrades in art and social justice, I'm writing to ask for your help designing next year's curriculum for the YBCA Young Artists at Work (YAAW) program. As you may know, YAAW is a paid, multidisciplinary art-as-activism residency program for youth offered every year here at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Over the past year, YAAW has been undergoing a pedagogical and programmatic transformation, shifting its focus from technical training in the arts to an individualized, project-based youth development model aimed at cultivating young creative thinkers and social changemakers. As we look towards the coming year, a major change we wish to implement is a shift towards one unified thematic throughline for the program - having all YAAWs work together using art to investigate a particular topic or idea. The theme of the 2013-14 YAAW program will be: Envisioning an Abolitionist Future. From our Statement of Purpose: In the coming year, the YBCA Young Artists at Work program will undertake a thematic, artsbased investigation of freedom, using the Prison Industrial Complex as a crucible to interrogate the institutionalized and intersecting systems that inhibit justice in our country. In conjunction with the 2013-14 YBCA season, the Young Artists at Work Program will engage its trademark multidisciplinary arts practice as a pedagogical lens to examine the complex matrix of oppressions that collude to perpetuate mass incarceration in America, and begin to theorize strategies for intervention, change, and liberation.

During the 2013 Summer Intensive, students will engage in social-justice trainings around (potentially including, but not limited to) anti-racism, anti-classism, queer positivity, feminist theory and practice, reproductive rights, and critical literacy of the judicial system as well as strategic and technical trainings on mobilizing art as a vehicle for social change. A historically multidisciplinary program, the Young Artists at Work will expand the scope of aesthetic study to include visual art, performance, film/video, storytelling and digital media practices to unpack the complicated relationship between American social and political economies and the contemporary crisis of mass incarceration.

Then, over the course of the 2013-14 year, the YBCA Young Artists at Work will engage in a collaborative devising practice, activating their research and activism to create a multidisciplinary arts experience to be presented in the Spring of 2014. This final creative offering will comprise the disciplinary interests of all YAAWs with particular emphasis on collaborative process, critical theory and research, social practice, and oral history and documentation, as well as a de-emphasis of didacticism in favor of a contemporary aesthetic approach.

We would like to invite you to participate in the 2013-14 YAAW Curriculum Development Think Tank to collaboratively brainstorm the set of educational activities, learning modules, texts, resources and best practices that could comprise this thematic learning experience. The think tank will be catered, and we intend to hire participants as contracted teaching artists for our YAAW Summer Intensive in July and August. Would you be available to meet at YBCA during any of the following times: Wednesday, May 22

10:00 - 12:00 2:00 - 4:00 4:00 - 6:00 6:00 - 8:00

Thursday, May 23

10:00 - 12:00 2:00 - 4:00 4:00 - 6:00 6:00 - 8:00

Friday, May 24

10:00 - 12:00 2:00 - 4:00 4:00 - 6:00 6:00 - 8:00

Please don't reply-all with your preferred dates - just let me know directly what works for you. Once we have arrived at an ideal meeting time, I will send out the key questions that we will be addressing as a group. In the meantime, please feel free to begin thinking about:

Resources that might offer appropriate points-of-entry for youth to engage with the concept of the PIC Activities and exercises that you yourself have found successful in creative community work around this theme. We are indebted to Evan Bissel and the UC Berkeley ACES Program for initiating their own institutional move towards Abolition Pedagogy, and inspiring us to do the same. We are grateful to count you among our network of artist and educators committed to the politics of freedom and justice. We look forward to having you all in a room to help frame the creative conversation. We welcome your questions, feedback, and especially your catering requests :)

Much love, Laurel, Jova and the YBCA Young Artists at Work program -Laurel Butler Education and Engagement Specialist Youth Arts Manager YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103 USA P: 415-321-1317 F: 415-978-9635 www.ybca.org