City Arts Vacation Camp- Protest Posters

For the week-long school vacation in February, the Charter Corps team collaborated with the AmeriCorps team at Providence City Arts, an arts education organization that shares a building with Highlander. The camp's theme was "I Have a Dream", based off of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech during the March on Washington in 1963. We offered a number of classes that discussed the civil rights movement out of which the speech came and which created a space for students to creatively respond to the text and history.

I taught a class for an older group of middle school students which focused on the role of posters as a crucial part of activism.
Continue on to learn more and see examples of their work


On the first day, we looked at historical posters used in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and created our own version of these.

We then moved on to a discussion of our communities and any issues which might call for activism today. The students first mapped out and drew depictions of their communities. These maps included both the good (the smells of fresh food and the sounds of music) and the bad (foreclosure signs on boarded up houses and the sounds of gunshots).

Working from those drawings and a group discussion on community issues, the class split into four groups to develop designs for silk-screened posters. Their topics ranged from the local to the global. One group created a powerful image against gang violence while another campaigned against animal cruelty in cosmetics testing. Another told us that stereotyping is for computers, for those who don't think or see. The last created a fresh version of an anti-drug message. The students developed all of the artwork and slogans on their own and did an amazing job of cutting out the stencils for the screens without losing much detail. The printing came down to the wire, but all four posters were hung up for the end of the week exhibition and each student got to take home a copy of their group's design.

My copies of the four posters are proudly hanging on the walls of my apartment next to prints by some of this city's most well-known screenprinters, a testament to the great work the students did in a few days. I'm looking forward to making another run or two of prints during next month's vacation camp. The prints are also hanging at the Providence Public Library downtown on Empire Street!