Young Artivist Club: Trinity City Arts x Morris Jeff High School

This week on the blog, we’re hearing from Morris Jeff High School students about their experience in the Young Artivist Club, facilitated by Trinity City Arts. 

Guest post written by Tulane University student Chloe Webster, edited for length and clarity. 

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Evelyn Rodriguez, Morris Jeff High School student.

Evelyn Rodriguez and Marley Duplessis are both students at Morris Jeff High School and participants in the Artivist Club. Their group “We Are People” is working to combat harmful racial stereotypes, colorism, and texturism in the BIPOC community. As a group, they will create a collage or zine that encapsulates these messages. 

Individually, Evelyn will contribute a written narrative that will be incorporated into the collage/zine. Evelyn believes strongly in everyone’s right to a voice; her experience in the Artivist Club has inspired her to become more involved in writing about the injustice and presence of ICE in New Orleans. 

Marley will be contributing a poem to the group’s collage/zine. Specifically, Marley wants to focus on colorism and texturism. She believes strongly in dissolving divisions between groups, emphasizing throughout the interview the importance of unity.

I had the opportunity to interview Evelyn and Marley, and I asked them a series of questions about Artivist Club and the work they are creating. 

Chloe: What do you enjoy most about the Artivist Club sessions?

Evelyn: I like how they talk about all the different events going on in the world, as we have

talked about ICE and about how race affects people and how they are affected by other people. They really try to encourage us not to be afraid to speak up.

Marley: So far, I like the collaboration. Everyone [works in] groups and everyone has different ideas, but we all work together to form one big idea.

C: I understand your group's theme is “We Are People.” What does “We Are People”

symbolize to you, and how did your group decide on this topic?

E: Every sentence we speak carries judgement. Speak in slang or with an accent, and you're considered uneducated. Speak too “proper” and you sound too white. [But] everyone has the same color blood, so it doesn’t really matter what your skin color is. That’s how we came up with it, because everyone is human. We are all the same.

M: [A classmate and] I decided that we wanted to do colorism and texturism. [The old narrative has] harmful stereotypes, and points to differences between lighter skin and darker skins, as well as hair patterns. [The new narrative is] combating those stereotypes and trying to get people to understand that we are all on the same side, so we should be united.

C: What medium have you chosen to work in for this project?

E: I am planning on doing a sort of narrative writing, so not explaining the collage, but trying to find different examples to tie in everybody’s different forms of art. [For the collage/zine], we have been discussing the different art forms, like paintings we want to include.

M: I’m writing a poem. It isn’t done, but I have an idea of what I’m going to write, and I think we may do a zine. 

Carolina Guadalupe (Trinity City Arts Creative Design Director) leads a workshop with Marley and Evelyn’s class.

C: How is your project coming so far? What do you envision the final product to be?

E: We are [in the planning period]. We all have our different ideas, so in our [most recent] session we were discussing how we want to present our project– either a collage or a booklet. I feel like everybody’s final product should tie into each other so that other people can look at it and feel a strong emotion towards it. That’s really our aim.

C: What is your creative process, and how has Artivist Club helped you cultivate this?

E: Carolina [Trinity City Arts’ Creative Design Director] gave us tips about how to show our art, and she suggested I put little sections of my writing on the collage.

M: [Trinity City Arts] pushes us to use real experiences that we have gone through to create the piece.

C: Who do you want this art to influence?

E: We mainly want it to influence everyone in the room– but if we had to choose, maybe

the people who are mostly affected by stereotypes.

M: I would like it to influence my whole school, because the school is like a gumbo– it’s

really diverse. [Morris Jeff] has all types of kids at the school.

C: What impact do you want people to take away from your art?

E: We want them to obviously feel a strong emotion about our art, but we also want them

to know that they shouldn’t be afraid and stick up for themselves and talk when they want to

talk.

C: In what ways will you take what you have learned from Artivist Club into the world at the end of the year?

M: I would like everyone to accept themselves and to take pride in who they are.

E: I never imagined writing about what I'm writing now. [Artivist Club] has encouraged me not to be afraid to speak up.

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Thank you, Chloe, for your thoughtful conversation with Evelyn and Marley!