#919: Painting Identities: Artmaking as Identity Work with Youth

Recent scholarship has called for the examination of young people’s identifications in relation to histories of marginalization and oppression, and as part of learning trajectories that are simultaneously social, cultural, and historical. The Rehacer el mundo project is a participatory design project with youth, museum educators, artists, and researchers to engage Latine and other historically marginalized youth and families in developing a youth-professional collaborative art exhibit. The project, located in an urban Latine arts museum, was designed to create opportunities for communities of historically marginalized youth to engage in reimagining public discourse. In this paper, we draw upon notions of artmaking to describe the ways youth from historically marginalized communities engage in identity building as historical actors. Our findings illustrate these metaphors have potential to expand understandings of learning and identity development as an inherently cultural process.