Colorado Students Inspired by DAM Exhibition to Design Social Justice Posters

April 21, 2015 update: Four Colorado student posters were chosen for the exhibition Museums: pARTners in Learning 2015 sponsored by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), in partnership with the United States Department of Education in Washington, D.C. The exhibition will be on view in Washington from May 6−June 30, 2015. See all of the posters designed by students at Vista Peak Exploratory and Arapahoe Ridge High School in the image gallery below.

Over the past year a socially charged poster exhibition graced the walls of the Denver Art Museum. If you were able to see Drawn to Action: Posters from the AIGA Design Archives curated by Darrin Alfred, associate curator of architecture, design, and graphics, then, like me, you were probably inspired by the striking images and bold statements in the posters. Thanks to the exhibition, the posters became the subject of two distance-learning classes for students at Vista Peak Exploratory in Aurora Public Schools and Arapahoe Ridge High School in Boulder Valley School District.

Joy Pack, visual arts instructor at Vista Peak Exploratory, first reached out to me as she was planning a weeklong intensive course that would challenge her middle-school students to explore the power of art to challenge social-justice issues. Joy collaborated on a distance-learning class to introduce students to the DAM poster exhibition to inspire them to design social-justice posters. I shared this project idea with Kim Walter, applied technology teacher, and Sarah Flynn, art teacher, both at Arapahoe Ridge High School in Boulder Valley School District, and they thought the topic would resonate especially well with their high-school students.

I hope to work with more students locally and nationally around the topic of art and social justice. Thanks to Marty’s customized tour I now see the potential for connecting this topic to various DAM collections.