Wild Art

Wild Art connects underserved youth to nature in the most urban place: South Los Angeles. Through visual arts, sustainability education and creative skill-building the program empowers students to protect nature and improve their local community. Wild Art is a program of RuckusRoots, a nonprofit organization founded in 2010. Wild Art will be offered to about 50-75 youth as a voluntary after school program for high school students at Augustus Hawkins High School in South Los Angeles for 8 weeks this fall (September and November of 2019). (Expected audience is 500.)
Wild Art blends visual arts education from skilled teaching artists with sustainability education from local ecology experts. Students learn about Los Angeles’s vast array of urban wildlife alongside lessons about color theory, drawing, painting & creative reuse. They complete a final project: a painting of a threatened species (e.g.: the monarch butterfly or steelhead trout) and are responsible not only for designing / painting this final project but also for creating the medium upon which it is painted.