Community organizations around Fort Worth continue to make a daily difference in the lives of our children. Artes de la Rosa Cultural Center for the Arts, located on the Northside, is doing just that while preserving an important part of the city’s history and enhancing our cultural landscape.
As part of Read Fort Worth’s Summer Scholars Collaborative, Artes hosted Summer Camp 1 in June. The Summer Scholars Collaborative will reach more than 3,000 students at more than 60 sites across the city. Each program is embedded with a purposeful literacy component designed to help prevent “summer slide,” the loss of literacy levels over the summer.
The Artes camp featured about 80 students and concluded with a two-day theater & dance performance and art exhibition. The camp challenged the students and pushed them to create, said Executive Director William Giron.
“What we accomplished was student education, empowerment and engagement through participation,” Giron said. “We learned essential and hard skill-sets, had fun and produced a community theater & dance performance and art exhibition from ground up at the end of the session.”
The typical day at camp consisted of a two-hour vocal class in the morning and a five hours of block scheduling in the afternoon of theater performance, creative writing, and dance and visual arts divided in 45-minute slots.
As for the reading component, students in the creative writing class had the opportunity to write in journals short stories about their lives and develop fictional characters, and share those works with their peers by reading aloud daily.
Giving students a voice, not just at camp, is one of the core missions of Artes and its impact in Fort Worth. Continuing to cultivate support and spread the message is a role Giron takes seriously.
“The community benefits from Artes Academy as it takes at-risk students off the streets, prevents them from making unwise choices, provides them a program that educates, empowers and engages them to have a voice,” he said. “The program provides a safe and fun environment where it builds and cultivates life skills, student character development, emotional intelligence, strengthening literacy and Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) initiatives that are needed in students’ everyday life, classroom and eventually the boardroom.
“The fine arts discipline’s tools used are theater performance, creative writing, music, dance and visual arts. The communities that include business, family, elected officials and collaborative nonprofit partners can support Artes by sustaining current and building new relationships through engagement, financial, in-kind and volunteer.”
Artes de la Rosa is dedicated to preserving, promoting, and interpreting the art, culture, lives, and history of the Latino community for all by:
- Establishing a venue for Latino art and cultural performances;
- Offering educational art/culture programs to the community including youth in low-income neighborhoods;
- Providing opportunities and support for established and emerging artists and performers;
- Serving as the central support organization and resource center for Latino art and culture in the City of Fort Worth.
Artes also held a Technology Camp earlier in July that focused on STEAM projects, including working with iPads, stylus and variety of visual art applications and internet to create of two short films, and a digital and physical books the students’ lives. Artes will be premiering and screening those short films in conjunction with a featured film to the public on July 27.
Artes is also currently recruiting for a 12-week fall session scheduled to begin August 26 and another in spring 2020. For more information on Artes de la Rosa and its youth programs, visit artesdelarosa.org.
Article by Art Garcia