A House of Art and Passion by Jack

A House of Art and Passion by Jack - February 2020 Scholarship Essay

This is an easy question for me to answer, because I have been dreaming about starting a nonprofit organization for the past year and a half. My biggest passions are creating art, education, and social justice, and it is the main pillar of my personal philosophy that those three things are intrinsically linked. If I were to start a nonprofit, it would be called the Kristina Vasa House. Brief history lesson: Kristina Vasa (1626-1689) was a gender-nonconforming monarch of Sweden who brought leaps forward in art, literature, and philosophy to their country. The Kristina Vasa house would primarily host after-school programs for queer and trans high-school students. It would teach continuous classes in writing, visual art, filmmaking, and theatre, and I would prioritize guest workshops as well. There would be periodic gallery/showcase nights, where students would have the opportunity to screen their films, present their art, and perform their theatre pieces. In keeping with the tradition Kristina Vasa upheld during their time as ruler of Sweden, every Thursday night the space would be rearranged to be conducive to a Socratic seminar, and I would host philosophical or literary discussions. These would be open to anyone, not just the students at the classes, because I want any space I create to be one of dialogue, a place where people are comfortable to wrestle with uncomfortable ideas.
My ultimate goal would be to eventually establish a sort of junior artist residency program. Each year one young visual artist, one young playwright, and one young filmmaker would be given unfettered access to a studio space, as well as a small stipend, and spend a year making a project that would be presented at the end of the year. Young artists, in my experience, are rarely given the time, space, or resources to create something from the ground up; I have been lucky enough to have a theatre teacher who prioritizes her students’ creative process, and parents who are both invested in the arts, but even with that support there are many barriers between me and the completion of any project: my budget typically hovers somewhere around the five-dollar mark, and my studio is a bedroom with a limited range of movement and a carpet I can’t get paint on.
One of my personal heroes, Augusto Boal, believed that the arts should be “a rehearsal for reality,” or a space where marginalized groups can work through oppression sans the dangers oppression typically comes with, so that when they leave the gallery or theater they are equipped with both tools and confidence to rise above their stations. The Kristina Vasa House would apply that philosophy to a group that falls into the intersection of two marginalized groups: queer and trans people, and youth. LGBT representation is on the rise in mainstream media, but it is still stereotypical and usually ends with the one gay character dying before the halfway point. I think giving teens real, applicable training in the arts would not only empower them but also fix the representation problem in the future. And from my perspective, young creatives are dismissed far too often. In school, arts programs are cut or written off as less important than “core” classes, and at home SAT prep takes precedent over artistic exploration. The Kristina Vasa House would give students a space where their passion is the priority, and a plausible future career.