Youth Respond to COVID!

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a life-altering experience worldwide. Schools shut down, businesses closed, social interactions and public activities came to a halt, and many of us are still dealing with the after effect of these and many other life-altering changes. As through all events impacting humanity on a large scale, many turned to art as a way of expressing their experiences living through these unprecedented times. In early 2022, our Youth Arts for Change (YAC) program led by Lisa Smith embarked on a unique collaboration with our longstanding partner, Todos Juntos, to create a project with exactly this purpose: To engage youth in utilizing visual arts to explore and express their unique experiences through the pandemic and coinciding life events. 

Todos Juntos is a local organization that partners with organizations like Clackamas County Arts Alliance to uplift and support families and youth in Clackamas County through access to resources and services, including the arts. The partnership between our YAC program and Todos Juntos began in 2014 with just one project. Since then, it has proudly expanded to all four Todos Juntos sites throughout rural Clackamas County, providing after school and summer programming to their youth. 

In this collaboration, two specially developed art projects were used to engage approximately 30 Middle School youth from all four Todos Juntos sites in the rural communities of Canby, Molalla, Sandy, and Estacada in expressing their unique pandemic experiences. These projects were designed to elicit authentic youth expression about their experiences with the pandemic itself and coinciding life events. Many of these youth did not only live through witnessing the COVID-19 crisis but corresponding social isolation, economic instability, wildfires, and loss. Many left school in March 2020 not to return until September of 2021, over a year older and having experienced many life changes.

Using Found Poetry and Neurographic art, youth were encouraged to express their experiences living through the pandemic years. In the Found Poetry project, artists used a page from a fairytale to select words they felt conveyed their pandemic experience, then used imagery and other visual art to enhance these words further on their chosen page. The Neurographic project had youth using Neurographic art to express their experience with online school – both positive and negative. The pieces created from both projects poignantly display just how much these times have impacted the youth in our community. These young artists have provided a glimpse into how the pandemic has affected all of us in complicated, often conflicting ways. 

Thank you to Todos Juntos, the Clackamas County Cultural Coalition, and the Oregon Culture Trust for making this project possible!