ArtistYear

NATIONAL SERVICE FOR CITIZEN-ARTISTS.

ArtistYear is the first national AmeriCorps program for artists to dedicate themselves to a year of service to our country. 

WHY WE EXIST

4 million disadvantaged youth in our nation do not have access to arts education (National Endowment of Arts). Yet research shows when underserved students are involved in the arts, they reap significant academic, social, and personal benefits. ArtistYear’s mission is to address this Arts Education Gap by ensuring every underserved student in America has arts education through a National Service Arts Corps.

WHAT WE DO

We do so by developing, supporting and placing exceptional ArtistYear AmeriCorps Fellows--recent higher-education arts graduates across artistic disciplines including actors, creative writers, dancers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, and visual artists --as full-time Teaching Artists at low-income schools. Once placed in a low-income school with a partner teacher, each Fellow provides 1700 hours of arts education, deepening the quality of, and exposure to, arts standards via “Push-In” Classes (integrating arts with other subjects), Arts Clubs (arts programming linked to school-day curriculum) and Arts Interventions (small group sessions for off-track/at risk youth). 

This innovative strategy significantly bolsters arts education for our nation’s most vulnerable youth, with all its attendant benefits, while also improving student academic engagement, enhancing school climate and capacity, benefiting the larger community, and underscoring the importance of service for the next generation of Citizen-Artists.