Arts & Culture
More than a resume line: high schoolers build community in Art for All
With the summer rapidly drawing to an end, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) has said a fond farewell to its 2026 cohort of eleven Santa Cruz County high schoolers who participated in Art for All, a summer youth program.
By Louise Leong
With the summer rapidly drawing to an end, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) has said a fond farewell to its 2026 cohort of eleven Santa Cruz County high schoolers who participated in Art for All, a summer youth program. Now in its third year, the five-week program offers teenagers from across the county an experiential introduction to careers in the arts and an education in the importance of art, community, and culture. Importantly, it also provides transportation, a weekly stipend, and lunch for its youth participants, removing common barriers to participation for many families.
Based at the IAS, the program boasts a jam-packed schedule including seminars led by its professional museum staff on topics including the lifecycle of an exhibition, art handling, and basic tool usage; workshops with artists; and field trips to regional museums such as Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) in San José or the California Academy of Science in San Francisco. High schoolers spend the month of July deeply engaging with exhibitions, learning how to catalog and curate artworks, plan events, and form friendships with peers from other schools.
“For everyone at the IAS, Art for All is a favorite part of the year,” says IAS director Rachel Nelson. “It is such a pleasure to see the kids get excited not only about art, but how they can participate through creating exhibitions and programs in shaping the culture of our region.”
The Art for All program also offers an opportunity for UCSC college students to develop mentorship and professional skills. The youth participants are introduced to the program on the first day by Program Assistants (PAs), UCSC undergraduates who are hired and trained starting in Spring quarter to build the bones of the summer program with IAS staff. The PAs are responsible for facilitating activities, meal planning, and establishing the culture and tenor of the environment. For instance, the PAs and the youth participants begin the program by co-creating community agreements, a practice often established in social justice organizing spaces and used in Art for All to facilitate learning, openness, and care.
“I think that the community agreement process opens a dialogue about mutual respect ” observes Ren Luevano, program assistant and recent graduate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Madison Santos, program assistant and third-year Studio Art major/Education minor, agrees. “We set the tone early that this was a welcoming space.”
Over the course of the month, the youth spend lots of time with the exhibitions at the IAS, learning about artwork and their contexts and preparing to lead their own public tours. This summer, a student favorite was Libia Posada’s Blue Portrait, 2026, an installation of over 100 framed pieces of blue fabric that creatively visualizes the fast-growing prison population of aging women serving life without parole in California. Mae, one of the youth participants shared, “I feel very deeply connected to the artwork. Learning about the background issues makes me really reflect on the significance.”
Along with demystifying how exhibitions come to be, students work hands-on alongside artists as they learn about creative practice. They participated in a 2-day workshop on film editing and production taught by filmmaker Yasmine Benabdullah, creating their videos. The Art for All participants also created an artwork in collaboration with artist Gina Athena Ulysse, whose exhibition Redwoods Rasanblaj is on view at the IAS through August 16. Students brought old jewelry and discarded objects to weave, wrap, tie, and braid together materials to create a sculptural object using the process of rasanblaj, a Haitian Creole term meaning assembly, compilation, and/or the enlisting and regrouping of ideas, things, people, and spirits.
The culminating event for Art for All was a Family Fun Day, organized by the high school student participants on Saturday, July 25. The students applied their newly acquired skills to organize, promote, and produce a large-scale museum event. Inside the galleries, students gave bilingual tours of the current exhibitions and also displayed the sculptures and videos they created during the program. Outside, the beats of DJ Earl Monk provided the backdrop to multiple family-friendly activities including games, crafts, and face-painting. With family and friends in attendance, the students were able to celebrate their achievements and to flex their knowledge and skill as newly minted advocates for art, community, and culture.
“I learned about more than art. I learned about the power that people have as a community. It is always possible to make things better when people speak up and work together,” Layla, an Art for All student reflects.
The Art for All participants finished the program with more than an impressive line on their resume— they came away with enduring friendships and an embodied sense of community.
