The end of the school year is a busy time for any high school student, and the art students at Righetti High School know this full well. As the school’s gymnasium was buzzing with teens viewing the annual student art show—which featured work created throughout the year—art students from multiple classes were in the quad, spread on the pavement, participating in the chalk festival there during the late morning of June 1.
Hands stained with various colors, the small groups of teens laughed and talked while collaborating on the sidewalk chalk paintings as their art instructors LeeAnne Del Rio and Melissa Johnson spoke with the Sun.
“Most of their pieces are individual, in the art show, but these here are collaborations, they’re big, and they’re out in the sunlight for everyone to see,” Del Rio said. “We like to share this with the community because they see all this negative news on our teenagers, and that’s such a small percentage, so the community has this view, like, ‘What’s happened to our teenagers?’ This is our chance to really show the community what brilliance, what heart, what a sense of work ethic, and how sensitive they are.”
The bell rang, ushering hundreds of students, teachers, and administrators to pass by the ongoing chalk festival, with many calling out their approval and offering friendly greetings to the creative kids.
The art show and chalk festival are annual traditions for the art department, which help remind students, staff, and even parents what the artistic scholars are up to, but another art department project has been brewing for more than a year now, and the fruits of many students’ labor are ready to go out into the community. A collaborative project between the art department and the student-run Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) began last year with some seed money from the Fund for Santa Barbara.
What began as a small club project expanded into a poster campaign and projects in each of their classes, Del Rio and Johnson said. To address the problem coherently the class did some research first, Johnson explained.
“We did a month-long unit where it wasn’t just about creating at first. It included journals where the kids documented their own experiences with bullying, research, and history,” Johnson said. “In bullying, you’ve got bullying and the victim, but the majority of the people involved are the bystanders. We really wanted to show that in the posters, that if kids stand by and passively do nothing they are defaulting on the side of the bully.”
Once completed, the posters went up around Righetti’s campus, where students and teachers could see them between classes and during breaks.
Though there are national anti-bullying campaigns and movements ongoing on the internet, it’s not always present and visible on a campus, explained Righetti senior Monique Padron. She’s seen bullying at Righetti, but it’s not something that gets discussed critically among her peers, Padron explained, which is where the poster campaign helps.
“Bullying is talked about, but not really in school by the students,” Padron said. “There were all kinds of bullying addressed, like social media, bullying in person, and different varieties of people and consequences of bullying.”
The posters addressed people who get bullied for eating disorders, non-traditional gender identity, sexuality, and race. The overall theme reminds kids that their words and actions have consequences, and that fellow students may suffer from a careless but demeaning remark.
One student, junior Kunico Ishiki, took on “slut shaming,” which condemns women for expressing their sexuality. The poster includes two girls talking to each other, and another young woman whose body is covered in their words, like “slut,” “whore,” and “trash.”
“I see it a lot on campus and I don’t think it’s an issue that’s normally addressed by students, so they don’t see it as bullying,” Ishiki said. “I thought that writing the words over her body would really emphasize the impact that words can have on people.”
Ishiki said that even in the art class some students argued that slut shaming wasn’t a form of bullying and was normal. The poster has helped change minds, she said, both in and outside of class.
The poster campaign is now moving off campus, Del Rio and Johnson explained, and posters are available to businesses and institutions locally that want to help spread the word and show work done by Righetti art students. For students like Ishiki, the power of art to address issues is potently obvious from her experiences on campus, and she’s excited to see the campaign expand into the community.
“Art is a platform where people can relate and see things differently,” she said. “You get to share your thoughts and ideas with people who maybe wouldn’t have those same concepts.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne likes to see artists stand up in the face of bullying. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 9-16, 2016.