Education, art and Activism: Collecting the Stories of World-Changers

honors thesisCollege of Fine ArtsArt & Art HistoryBeth KrenskyThis thesis explores the idea of civically-engaged artwork that sparks conversation, specifically artwork created by young people, and often fostered by educators and community collaborators. For the purpose of this thesis, I define civically-engaged and activist art as art that is created with the intention of sparking dialogue (including an internal dialogue) about creating change on an individual, communal, or structural level. This work begins with a brief history of youth engaging in arts-based civic dialogue, then present the results of interviews I conducted with young artists and community collaborators in the Salt Lake Valley. This includes key practices that they believe have led to success in their activist artworks. I also discuss my experience as a community collaborator, and present my own portfolio work that falls within this category, as well as a specific thesis artwork. At the end of this work, I have attached a collection of lesson plans developed based on the results of the interviews discussed in the thesis, which are intended to assist community collaborators in facilitating the creation of civically-engaged artworks