Artmaking as Assertion: Youth Artmaking as Cultural Learning Pathways Toward New Identities

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Engaging in Arts and Making as Acts of Transformative Identity Building

Abstract

Objectives & Perspectives
Studies of identity have a long history in educational research, yet deepening understandings of identity building along cultural pathways can help us collectively reimagine the world (e.g., Gutiérrez et al., 2019; Nasir et al., 2020). We build from notions of politicized trust (Vakil et al., 2016) and activism as acts of poetics and creativity (Hayes & Kaba, 2023) to explore the artistic pathways young people build toward transformative identities. By transformative identities, we mean the ways young people develop identities in relation to historicized perspectives (e.g., Gutiérrez et al., 2019) to transform dominant narratives (Vakil et al., 2016). We ask: How do youth artists use artmaking to explore or assert politicized and transformative identities?

Methods, Data Sources, & Analysis
We draw from qualitative and ethnographic methods within a participatory design research project (Authors, 2016). From September 2024 to July 2025, 40 young people, all of whom identified as having historically marginalized identities, engaged with nine professional artists and five facilitators and researchers to create art for a youth-curated art exhibit at a Latin American art museum. Data sources included artifacts, audio and video, interviews, and fieldnotes. Analysis relied on engagement with youth and facilitators, with iterative coding of patterns around power, politics, trust, justice, healing, and ancestral stories.

Results & Significance
While we saw all of the young people we worked with engaging in artmaking as activism and transformative identity building to varying degrees, we offer one representative example from the program. Adria (pseudonym), a 13-year old who self-identified as Latina, wrote, “It’s important for me to become a lawyer because I want to provide the support people need during hard times.” The program took place as the Trump administration increasingly perpetuated violence against people in the U.S. While Adria did not directly reference politics in her journal, conversations led us to understand she was seeking a future where she could protect those who looked like her.

In the middle of the first week, the lead artist invited the young people to engage in embroidered images as a way to explore artmaking (Figure 1). Facilitators offered photos from the 1970s U.S. Chicano movement in response to the themes the young artists were raising around justice. Adria, along with several of her peers, requested more contemporary photos. Adria tore the photos into pieces, stitching them back together toward a new “world” (Figures 1 & 2). She explained that she saw art as protest to “bring people back together.” During collaborative analysis, one of the facilitators explained art allowed Adria to express ideas she “didn’t immediately seem to have in words.”

Linguistic representation of our identities in relation to histories are sometimes elusive (Authors, 2014). Artmaking has potential as a pathway for young people to immediately see themselves as activists. Here, we offer examples of the artistic pathways (Nasir et al., 2020) youth carve toward new identities to reimagine themselves as powerful agents able to enact change and push against inequitable systems as they restitch the world anew.

Authors

• Kristina M. Stamatis, University of Nebraska Omaha

• Joseph L. Polman, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Marisa Mendoza-Maurer, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Tania Hogan, University of Colorado - Boulder