About this project

A week-long printmaking master class that celebrates 15 years of Young Artists at Work and produces limited edition silkscreens for our backers!

The Story
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco developed a youth arts program fifteen years ago to give arts education opportunities to talented teen artists from underserved and disadvantaged communities. The program, called Young Artists at Work (YAAW), offers youth a hands-on experience in curating, art-making and media activism. The basic idea is simple: identify public schools where the arts programs have suffered the most, find students/budding artists at these schools who would benefit from the program, provide support and skills training to encourage the inner artist to flourish, and connect them to their immediate artistic community with a summer internship. Since the program’s inception, over 300 young artists have participated in this program and they, in turn, have expanded the impact of the program to provided peer education to over 7,500 youth.

The Project
To commemorate the 15th anniversary of the youth arts program, we would like to create a limited edition silkscreen print as part of a week-long master printmaking class for current and past YAAW students who have shown promise in the medium. These 15 students will use the state-of-the-art facilities at Kala Art Institute (www.kala.org) to further their design and printing skills. Each student will produce one 15”x18” self-designed silkscreen as part of the class in addition to a limited edition 15”x18” anniversary silkscreen in collaboration with artist and teacher, Josefina Jacquin (http://josefinajacquin.com/). Our goal is to raise $7,000 to pay for the artist and studio time, as well as the materials used in the printmaking process, transportation costs and shipping fees.

About Our Collaborators: Kala Art Institute and Josefina Jacquin
Kala Art Institute, founded in 1974 by Archana Horsting and Yuzo Nakano as an international workshop and forum for ideas, provides exceptional facilities to professional artists working in all forms of printmaking, digital media, photography, and book arts. Located in the former Heinz ketchup factory in West Berkeley since 1979, Kala’s 8,500 square foot facility houses an extensive array of artmaking equipment, as well as a public exhibition gallery, an art library and an extensive print archive.

A native of Santa Marta, Colombia, Josefina Jacquin obtained her BA at San Francisco State University (1995), and her M.F.A. at The San Francisco Art Institute (1997). Josefina has consistently exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically at The de Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Museum of the Legion of Honor and in numerous institutions both in the United States and overseas. Her work has also been included in permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and The Museum of Modern Art in Cartagena, Colombia.