Detroit Institute of Arts Teen Arts Council
FAIN: GA-254292-16
Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI 48202-4008)
Teri John (Project Director: September 2016 to March 2021)
The DIA respectfully requests a $30,000 grant from the NEH
to create a Teen Arts Council that will give young adults an opportunity to use
the DIA as a space to explore, challenge, celebrate, interpret and question. As
paid advisors to the museum, they will help design, promote, and implement
relevant teen arts programming. They will, among other things, help the museum
develop a year of programming related to the 50th anniversary of
Detroit’s summer of 1967. July of that year in Detroit was one of the deadliest
and most traumatic periods of civil unrest in American history. The events
(rooted in race and poverty) radically shaped the city we know today. Teens
will engage in authentic work like this as they develop and refine skills
necessary to thrive as dynamic, creative, and critically thinking adults. The
DIA will recruit teens from the 33 regional high schools that the DIA has
collaborated with since we created a Director of Education Programs position in
2014. We will ask participating schools administrators to help the teens
connect their work at the DIA to initiatives within their schools. The extended
outcomes for our Teen Council are that participants will: 1) Feel comfortable
and connected with their peers, 2) Explore their identities, experience
personal growth, and build self-awareness, 3) Develop a perspective that is
informed and challenged by art and museum experiences with others, 4)Cultivate
leadership skills that will support taking on roles of influence as socially
engaged community builders now and in their futures, 5) recognize the value of
artistic and cultural experiences, and 6) Build lifelong relationships with museums
and cultural institutions.