Park Slope Student Creates Outlet For NYC's Young 'Artivists'

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN —If there's one word to sum up the goal of Project Kaleidoscope — a publication launched this year by a pair of high school students — it's the one created to refer to its members.

The scores of young illustrators, painters and writers who have submitted work to the social justice website have been dubbed "artivists," a combination of artists and activists, by their leaders.

The word is meant to articulate the publication's goal of "bridging art and advocacy," or bringing together the need for social justice conversations with the power of art, co-founder Emma Donnelly said.

"We can advocate for social justice in many ways — we can do it with our voices, but we can also do it with our art," Donnelly, who lives in Park Slope, told Patch. "A lot of people enjoy art for its aesthetics...I really want to show that art is a medium that can drive profound change."

Donnelly founded Project Kaleidoscope with fellow Stuyvesant High School student Kelly Guo after starting a club devoted to the project at their school last year.

The idea for the club first came to Donnelly when she was interning at Project GO, a nonprofit devoted to educational equity, and realized that issues like the organization's mission seemed largely absent from her public school education.

"Education related to social justice issues is very vacant even up until high school," Donnelly said, noting her school's science, technology, engineering and mathematics focus. "People are focused on their grades and I wanted to show there are a lot of broader issues out there."

The club, which has about 50 members, envisioned a way to connect students from across New York City, no matter their access to the city's most well-funded schools, Donnelly said.

It was that inciting idea that became the topic of their first issue about educational inequity, which launchd a few months ago.

The publication has since published issues about the Black Lives Matter movement and Mental Health.

Donnelly said the inaugural issues, which the club had been working on for several months, became all the more important once they realized they would be published during the coronavirus-induced school closure.

Instead of holding in-person fundraisers and exhibits, the publication became a virtual outlet for its members.

"The website was a great way to connect people over quarantine," Donnelly said.

Project Kaleidoscope has so far reached students from five schools across Brooklyn and Manhattan, Donnelly said. Its members are talking now to middle schoolers in the hopes of getting younger grades involved.

Upcoming issues will likely focus on environmental activism, given the wildfires in California, she added.

"I want the art to serve as a platform for people to address the issues we’re discussing and hold those conversations about it," she said. "We really hope to expand to other schools and spread the word about what we’re doing."

Find Project Kaleidoscope's first three issues and more information about how to submit work here.