Summary: To engage inner city youth in the arts by creating a print studio with teen apprentices
Winner: Fresh Artists
Amount: $75,000
About the project: To engage inner city youth in the arts while helping them cultivate job skills, Fresh Artists will create a print studio to produce their signature large-scale digital reproductions of children's artwork. Teen apprentices will help with large-format digital printing, art registration, packing and e-commerce fulfillment and participate in Sprout Fest, the annual exhibition of children's artwork. With a focus on collaboration, Fresh Studio will foster inter-generational relationships by bringing together children, teens and art teachers, current and retired, who constitute the art-making stakeholders in this nonprofit corporate art consultancy.
About the winner: Fresh Artists is a young nonprofit organization that aims to promote access for all children to the transformative self expression of art making and philanthropy. It empowers young lives through art by engaging children as full partners in philanthropy, by widely exhibiting large reproductions of children’s artwork in highly visible places and by providing innovative art experiences and art supplies to severely under-resourced public school art teachers. To encourage the philanthropy of children, Fresh Artists has written two illustrated children’s storybooks (Pablo, the Philly Philanthropist); created Fresh Artists Sign Studio, an entrepreneurial graphic design business where third through fifth graders design artwork for healthy food grocery co-operatives; and launched Fresh Artists Clothesline Art Shows, a grassroots initiative enabling one child or many children to raise funds to deliver art supplies to schools in need. In partnership with The Barnes Foundation, the Fresh Artists Mini-masterpieces program allows children to visit museums and then adopt and interpret a masterpiece from that collection back in their classroom. In its first three years Fresh Artists delivered more than $117,000 in quality art supplies to Philadelphia public schools and placed 830 large-scale digital reproductions of children’s artwork in corporations from Oregon to Washington, D.C.
Web site: http://www.freshartists.org
