Self As Super Hero with the Legacy Project: 28th Annual ArtEsteem Exhibition Series
As we approach our highly anticipated 28th Annual ArtEsteem Exhibition, we want to share about what's going on in our classrooms, and what you can look forward to at the Exhibition.
We'll start with the 2025-2026 cohort of ArtEsteem's in-house after school environmental arts, advocacy, and leadership program, the Legacy Project!
In his 1967 “A Time to Break Silence” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. shared, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”
Legacy honored MLK’s birthday and call to action by supporting Bay Area Youth Climate Summit in their second annual climate justice rally. In collaboration with 100+ youth, our students designed environmental justice posters, performed speeches about hope, and participated in the rally around Dolores Park in San Francisco. Their chants were heard throughout the park, with cars beeping and people clapping as they passed by.
The following weekend, Legacy students went on a Frontline Communities Toxic Tour of East Oakland hosted by Communities for a Better Environment. From the airport expansion at MLK Shoreline, to the abandoned lots at the Coliseum, to community organizing at EnCompass Academy (one of our ArtEsteem school sites), students were exposed to the health, environmental, and racial disparities that directly impact their neighborhoods. This tour allowed students to contextualize the climate justice movement to include environmental justice within their own communities. To finish MLK’s quote, “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”
Legacy students are undergoing an interdisciplinary year-long course which empowers them to become the artists, heroes, and changemakers their communities need. Through art-making, oral history, civic engagement, and ecological exploration, students honor ancestral wisdom while envisioning themselves as agents of transformation in their communities.
The course is divided into interwoven threads of artistic expression and environmental justice, with both strands guiding students through personal and collective storytelling, hands-on studio practices, and real-world activism. Throughout the year, students deepen their understanding of how art and activism intersect, developing both their creative voices and their roles as cultural and ecological caretakers in their communities.
In the fall, students created Día de los Muertos-inspired altars and sculptures, investigating ancestral stories and cultural memory through portraiture, symbolism, and mixed media. In the winter, students are designing life-size Self as Super Hero paintings, envisioning themselves as heroes addressing real-world social and environmental issues they care deeply about. In the spring, students will learn more about local ecology and address a local pollution problem through eco-friendly reuse cardboard sculpture.