It’s back-to-school time for the Broad.
The Broad museumis launching a new educational initiative, it announced on Saturday. “Our Block, Our Stories” will pair students with contemporary artists to explore how those artists have been inspired by their local neighborhoods, communities and personal experiences.
The program, open to grades 3 through 12, includes off-site activities and field trips to the museum. The Broad is paying for students’ transport to the museum.
The inaugural project will focus on South Los Angeles students and spotlight L.A. artist Lauren Halsey. Students will visit Halsey’s South L.A. sculpture garden, “sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles,” to explore themes of neighborhood, memory and belonging. Halsey’s work, which debuted in March, was presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division and curated by LAND co-founder Christine Y. Kim.
Students will then, on the same day, travel to the Broad for guided tours, discussions and writing prompts. They’ll be encouraged to connect their personal experiences to works in the museum’s collection while also considering how they might creatively express their own life stories, from their individual communities, through art. April De Leon, Broad interim school program manager, is overseeing the program.
“It’s so we can bring hundreds of young people [to the museum] so they can be inspired to be creative — and in a way that helps their community, gives back to their community, transforms their community and their city,” said Ed Patuto, Broad director for audience engagement. “We’ll look at how other artists, too — like Mark Bradford, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres — deal with their neighborhoods and opportunities in their neighborhoods for inspiration.”
The museum will provide educators with on-site worksheets and background materials on the artists, along with other pre-visit and post-visit resources in English and Spanish.
Field trips to the museum begin Sept. 18, though the Broad is still enrolling schools in the program. It’s giving priority to schools and youth organizations in and around South L.A. The Halsey program runs through Dec. 11.
Patuto said that Halsey was the perfect artist to launch the program. Not only is her work represented in the Broad’s collection, but “she’s an artist who’s influenced by her community and, like a Mark Bradford, is actually building something in her community, for her community,” he said. “And that needs to be supported by arts institutions around the city.”
The idea behind the sculpture park, when Halsey first conceived it about 16 years ago, she said in an interview, was a space that represents and pays homage to the neighborhood, both aesthetically and conceptually.
“The heroes, the poetics, the material culture, the everyday,” she said. “But also, that it’s a sculpture park that serves — and for free — the neighborhood and L.A. at large.”
The Broad says it will continue to develop “learning modules” over the next several years.
The next one will launch in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition, “Has the myth been shattered,” opening in November. The show of Broad collection works spanning six decades, as curated by Jen Vanegas Rocha, addresses myths “and the way social media, mass media, can kind of mythologize things that happened to us,” Patuto said.
Free, youth-oriented cultural programming such as “Our Block, Our Stories” is a game-changer, Halsey said, adding that field trips she took to LACMA in middle school helped give her confidence to create and solidify her identity as an artist.
She hopes the Broad’s new educational initiative does the same for other young artists.
“It builds pride in one’s own neighborhood and validates experiences and expands on the possibility of what you can be as a young child and sparks your imagination,” she said. “I didn’t have that growing up in South Central, this access to art. So it’s really cool that the Broad came in and is partnering with me to bring this amazing, free programming to the neighborhood.”
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