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The San Francisco Arts Education Project has its roots early 1960s, when the San Francisco Arts Commission created the Neighborhood Arts Program to foster connections between local artists and the wider community.
By 1968 (one year after the Summer of Love), change was definitely in the air, and two determined women—armed with little more than milk cartons, bits of yarn, and baker’s clay—determined to take that community engagement one step further, by making art an integral part of the city’s public school curriculum.
When sculptor Ruth Asawa and architectural historian Sally Woodbridge kicked off the Alvarado School Art Workshop—the organization that evolved into the San Francisco Arts Education Project—they had a $50 grant and a fierce determination to make an arts education available to all school children in San Francisco, regardless of neighborhood or income level. Pedagogical visionaries, Asawa and Woodbridge recognized the powerful impact that the visual and performing arts can have on a child’s life—clear through to adulthood.
The program evolved into what is now the San Francisco Arts Education Project and has remained true to its roots. For more than 50 years, SFArtsED has pursued its mission to enrich the lives of children by facilitating hands-on participation in the visual and performing arts—taught by practicing artists.
This is accomplished in a number of ways. SFArtsED supports artist residencies in an array of visual arts, dance, drama, musical theater, world rhythms, and choral expression at some twenty public schools and at after-school programs, where we also subsidize all administrative expenses. We offer weekend workshops in everything from collage to fashion design. And at our legendary summer camps, begun in 1995, students are immersed in a wide range of expressive disciplines, with nearly twenty percent of campers receiving critical scholarship assistance.
Our musical theater troupe, the SFArtsED Players, was founded in 2001, offers a rigorous, after-school and weekend training program for serious young performers (ages 9-14), culminating in a fully realized production every spring. Many of these talented students go on to attend Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA) for high school.
Artists, singers, and dancers at the high school and college levels benefit from internship opportunities at our summer camps and school programs. And students in SOTA’s technical theater program gain valuable outside experience in lighting, sound, and stage management at every Players performance.
And since March 2016, we have been fortunate to have an office and adjacent gallery/classroom space at the Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch arts district, where we hold workshops and exhibit student work—the sole nonprofit surrounded by some of the most esteemed contemporary art galleries in San Francisco.