“It’s like seeing an all-star roster, and there are no bad choices. You’re seeing amazing, amazing, beautiful artwork. And you’re having to vote the best of the best of the best. We don’t have any quotas, like we can only choose five kindergartners, we just choose the best art.”
Alison Scott-Williams, the president of Studio in a School NYC, was telling me about the difficult task of choosing the very best art from the over 1,200 pieces submitted this year for the PS Art program. Now in its 21st year, PS Art is an annual showing of the best of the best artwork made by K-12 students in New York City public schools, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As Scott-Williams shared with me, whittling down those 1,200-plus submissions to the 122 on display was daunting work, but worth it. “It’s a gift to be able to support young people in this way,” she said.
Scott-Williams has taken a long road to celebrating children’s art. A former vice-president of arts education with the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Scott-Williams long wanted to work more directly in the visual arts. She jumped at the chance to join Studio in a School, but unfortunately her arrival was just days before the Covid pandemic hit New York. Her first art exhibition with the organization took place, as she put it, “in a very large Zoom room”, and it seemed like forever before the art was again exhibited in-person. This is now Scott-Williams’s second in-person art exhibition with Studio in a School, and the electricity of the opening day thrills her.
“On the opening day it’s just magical,” she told me. “We had 300 kids and their parents to see the unveiling. Everyone is so exited, the noise level is up to here, and gleefully so. Everyone is talking together, it’s so joyful. For a lot of the parents it’s their first time coming to the museum – the child has been the conduit to expand the knowledge base of the family.”
Partnering with communities in 10 different states, Studio in a School works with numerous institutions around New York, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The organization was founded in 1977, in response to budget cuts that all but eliminated the arts from NYC public schools, and Studio in a School now offers programming from pre-K populations up through high-schoolers. As Scott-Williams put it, “we serve underrepresented children in underresourced neighborhoods.” This means providing opportunities to take part in the arts for children who may not get enough art curriculum – if any at all – from the schools where they learn.
For Scott-Williams, this is very personal work. A longtime jobholder in performance arts, she jumped at the opportunity to follow her passion to work in-depth with the visual arts. She specifically likes that Studio in a School focuses on schools served by Title I, a federal subsidy that supports low-income students – students who often come from neighborhoods that do not receive the resources they need to let them learn about the arts. “I’ve dedicated my career to helping students who look like me have a high-level training in the arts, period. I’m helping students who would not otherwise have the opportunity to work and study and learn the arts deeply. This is really important stuff to be doing.”
In addition to bringing these children the opportunity to get in-depth arts education, Studio in a School also offers them the remarkable opportunity to have their artwork shown in one of New York’s most prestigious museums. “To have your artwork in the Met, are you kidding me?” exclaimed Scott-Williams. “It’s the place, it’s a big deal.”
There are also some other nice perks to being chosen for the PS Art exhibition. Participating students automatically have their pieces recorded in the Met’s annals – meaning that the student’s name, their art, the school and their teacher will all be archived at the Met in perpetuity. Beyond that, the top 15 high school seniors chosen each year by Studio in a School receive a $1,000 scholarship. “They can use that $1,000 to go toward their tuition for college, said Scott-Williams. “Or they can buy art supplies with it. Or some combination of that.”
One piece from this year’s PS Art show that really stuck in Scott-Williams’s mind was the oil painting Granny’s Backyard made by Django Lewis, a senior at Fiorello H LaGuardia High School. As Lewis explained in the show’s catalog, the painting – a vibrant, colorful group portrait of family members – is based on a family photo from Trinidad and is part of Lewis’s artistic efforts to feel more connected to her Caribbean heritage.
“It was this huge painting, really huge – so big we had to hang it on a wall in our office, we just couldn’t put it down anywhere,” said Scott-Williams. “It was absolutely stunningly beautiful, everyone was like ‘oh my God’. It just said ‘Django’ in the corner. So I’ve been looking at this artwork for a few months, and when we announced the scholarships, this young woman stands up and walks toward me, and I’m like ‘oh my God, it’s a woman!’ To know that it was this young woman who had done it was so significant.”
Scott-Williams finds it “exceptional” that the PS Art exhibit is also a chance for young artists to come together and meet each other. She recounted how Lewis happened to serendipitously meet another high school senior exhibiting at PS Art named Tristan Vale, and their subsequent realization that both would be attending the famed art school Rhode Island School of Design in the fall. “What’s the likelihood that this would happen?” said Scott-Williams. “Had it not been for the confluence of all these things, it wouldn’t have happened. That was one of the more joyful moments of this experience.”
For Scott-Williams, it all comes beck to celebrating young people and giving them chances to feel important. She lamented that “school is set up to make parents happy about kids getting good grades,” and that there are “not a lot of moments set up to make people celebrate kids’ achievement in school”. She valued the PS Art program because it really does center kids and their creativity, giving a valuable opportunity to students who might not have had the chance to realize they could be artists. “Celebrating kids’ creativity is really important,” she told me.
“In order to create art at this level, you’re really nurturing and celebrating creativity. It gives parents a moment of highly celebrating their kids that’s different from sports or grades.”
PS Art 2023 is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 13 October
