Young students work together on a variety of projects throughout the school year, cultivating a community of compassion and tolerance.

Middle-school students learn about narrative art and folk art, then create a woodblock painting depicting a significant family memory.

Elementary students learn about the origins of their food from local farmers and create a mural based on local food systems.

Ryan Gardell, Artifakt Studio's creative director and mixed-media artist, shares his large-scale, uplifting community projects.

Students, muralists, and community members gather to create a mural celebrating the region’s Latin American heritage.

Jacob Ginga is an art educator, painter, printmaker, and street artist. His passion for art and desire to connect with others are vital components of his practice. His works, even when completely nonobjective abstractions, such as Brackish Waters (p. 51), employ diverse visual languages that invite viewers to contemplate the narratives Ginga believes are inherent in all of his work, though he rarely delivers definitive statements.

Multimedia artist Jen Stark shares her brilliantly colored works that draw upon science, math, nature, and spirituality.

View additional artworks from this issueʼs Contemporary Art in Context feature, Jen Stark shares her practice of combining color, depth, and geometry to create works that draw upon science, nature, math, and even spirituality.

High school students begin with a project on poster design and then researched information on the intersection of environmental action and art which evolved into a mural project and then into paintings around storm drains in the community.

Middle-school students collaborate to maintain a public space by creating paper bulletin board murals.

High School Lesson: American Sign Language (ASL) is kindred to the arts as it is a visual language. Combining the arts and ASL is one of many ways you can create an inclusive climate in your school community while celebrating school spirit. Our ASL murals evolved from a unit on plaster wrap and artist George Segal. With a goal to fully engage students, I selected a young adult fluent in ASL on TikTok as our primary resource to introduce the alphabet.