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Youth need art.
Youth need safe and creative spaces to explore who they are and who they are becoming. Art creates those spaces. There are an incredible number of barriers to accessing the arts for young people. Not all public high school students in San Francisco have access to art during their school day and whenever there are budget cuts, the arts are almost always the first to go. For youth of color and low income youth, that often leaves little opportunity for art in their lives.
Youth Art Exchange exists to make sure that San Francisco public high school students have critical access to the arts. We do this by offering free multidisciplinary programming taught by professional artists for public high school students and their communities at our arts hub [x]space in the Excelsior and creative spaces citywide.
Our vision is that every public high school student in San Francisco will have access to meaningful, in-depth arts education that amplifies their voices. We want spaces buzzing with the creative energy of professional artists and youth working together to make art, hang out, and build community — which we believe will change the world.
YAX's mission is to spark a shared creative practice between professional artists and public high school students, furthering youth as thinkers, leaders, and artists in San Francisco. We are committed to serving public high school students, with a focus on low-income students and students of color, through free, accessible, and high quality arts education and leadership development programming. We create opportunities for students to gain professional arts, leadership, and career-readiness skills through real-world community art projects. We serve 450 youth and more than 7,000 audience members per year through free arts programming, internships with stipends, and public events.
Our pairing of professional artists with youth fosters a multidisciplinary creative community where public art projects and civic interruptions emerge as art inspires action. Projects conducted in the context of all of the city’s vibrancies and disparities are realized beyond the classroom in the communities we serve. Our work includes architecture, black and white film photography, fashion design, illustration, industrial ansd product design, music production, and printmaking.
The arts have been proven to be instrumental in interrupting the status quo, rebuilding communities, boosting the economy, creating careers, encouraging civic engagement, and aiding in mental well being. Art is essential to understanding ourselves and others, building connections between people, and creating cultural and social justice interventions that spark change. The urgency of these needs and the challenge of delivering them have grown since the onset of the pandemic.
While San Francisco’s burgeoning economy values creativity and innovation, there are barriers to accessing arts in our city, especially for youth, working artists, and communities of color and low-income people. Approximately 89% of SFUSD’s 21,064 public high school students are youth of color. As schools face budget cuts, their arts programming is often the first to go and extracurricular arts programs are often cost- and logistically prohibitive for low-income families juggling transportation and a lack of resources. Beyond the disparities in access to arts for public school students, arts careers and exhibitions for working artists and curators have remained predominantly white and affluent. San Francisco youth need to see themselves in the arts too.
We need your support to keep our core programming free and make arts accessible to youth across San Francisco. With a newly acquired second space filled with dedicated and talented staff, critical funds donated to YAX today will ensure our infrastructural and operational capability is sustainable for our dynamic programs.
Funding YAX today will be investing in significant organizational growth while ensuring racial equity is at the center of everything that we do. Your funds support:
Join us in support of YAX to amplify the impact of the next generation of creators in San Francisco!
Youth Art Exchange (YAX) was founded in 2000 as Out of Site Youth Arts Center by an architect, Beth Rubenstein, and a visual artist, Jennifer Stuart, in response to growing needs for arts education for public high school students. As practicing artists and educators, YAX’s founders recognized the power of arts education to open doors for young people while the opportunities for public school students were rapidly diminishing. These youth, primarily low-income students and students of color, were those who were most lacking opportunities to deeply engage with the arts. YAX was founded to fill this gap, which is increasingly relevant with growing disparities in the city.
Our solution is to disrupt who has traditional access to the arts, starting with youth and their immediate communities. Our work at the intersection of the arts and youth development fosters a shared creative practice between practicing artists and public high school students, amplifying often-marginalized voices and giving youth vital free access to the arts. Our work centers creative spaces, creative practice, creative exchange, and creative inclusion. And this access extends to students’ families, friends, and neighbors.
Our impact has been strong for more than 20 years. Since 2000, YAX has led community arts education in San Francisco with more than 15,000 students, 150 faculty artists, and 100,000 audience members as part of our community. Every year we invest nearly $3,000 per student to ensure free access to quality art programs. We serve a strong percentage of black and brown students (30% Latinx, 20% Black, 30% Asian, 10% multi-ethnic and/or multi-racial, 10% white), and our leadership demographics are reflective of the youth we engage. Many alumni have also gone on to teach and work at YAX. Not all youth go on to be artists or participate in creative sector careers, but what they take with them from YAX gives them a strong, transferable foundation for their future. The impact of YAX is seen through our extensive network of alumni and their stories — many of them making impacts in vastly different career areas.
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