Blog Entry By Leslie C. Sotomayor

Art empowers us to interconnect through diversified ways of thinking and creating meaning for our humanity and communities. Art facilitates creative ways for engagement and navigating difficult issues, emotions, and well being. How can we reimagine the arts towards social change in different ways through art education and virtual worlds? As I reflect in the midst of so much chaos in the U.S. with a pandemic and an increase of social unrest, I believe we are in an opportune time as artists and educators to create meaningful change and disrupt the traditional troupes of what art education is and can be. 

As I taught for the sixth summer with the Upward Bound Program it was a very different experience via a virtual realm with no physical studio space. I had to develop ways to create a meaningful curriculum for students in the arts that was interdisciplinary and accessible. All of the students were afforded an art box with basic art materials and a laptop with a camera for virtual meetings. I decided to center my curriculum on the work of Puerto Rican artist Soraida Martinez http://www.soraida.com and the theorizing she coined titled verdadism. Verdad is the Spanish word for truth and ism is the suffix that means the theorizing of an idea or concept. Martinez’s theorizing and work stems from a place of grappling with her own identity and history as a woman of color who did not fit into any one category neatly and grew tired of underrepresented artwork in the United States being diminished and undervalued within the art world. She chose to challenge and resist traditional norms in the art world by creating her own genre of work. Martinez confronted the racist and sexist social issues and microaggressions she experienced and witnessed as she paints abstract images and activates a new language for herself through verdadism. Martinez paints and juxtaposes her paintings with a title and text that is showcased together to contextualize the art pieces and position her art into the world in the way in which she deems necessary addressing social and everyday issues as a Puerto Rican woman. Martinez developed this style to stand in her truth and theorize about her art in ways that are meaningful to her, from the inside out. 

As I introduced Upward Bound high school students to the work of Soraida Martinez I layered the idea of art and language with improvisations for curious art-making. What I mean by this is a simple yet often overlooked component of being intentional about meeting each student where they are in their creative process and allow for that point to serve as a place for engagement and creative processes. For example, one student created a symbol around a concept for an initiative that was sparked by the Star Wars movie series. He created meaning with his symbology in the design and color palette theorizing about who would use the symbol and why in his imagined team for social justice (see image 1). I share here various examples of student’s artwork in a variety of ways all done via virtual teaching, discussions, and documentation of creative processes (see images 2 and 3 below). What I have learned throughout this process is that meaningful connections through virtual spaces are more than possible and offer new ways of thinking and implementing new forms of knowledge production in art education.  

High School student created a motif symbol of a team initiative as a new branch of Star Wars with a storyline (theorizing) about the history and initiative creating a team defending social justice.

Another student combined her interest in digital photography and poetry by writing a series of three poems, translated into Spanish, and taking photos in her house of staged scenes and editing the photographs on her laptop. 

Another Student created a graphic novel in English and together we translated the graphic novel into Spanish for bilingual readers. See more here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/TransformacionesClubdeGatos?src=hashtag_click

Leslie Sotomayor received a Dual PhD in Art Education and Women’s Studies in 2020. She is an Assistant Professor in Art Education at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.