On Friday, August 22 2025, Art Division came together with students, staff, families, and community members to prepare 200 boxed lunches for the day laborers in our neighborhood. Along with the meals, we distributed much-needed socks, long-sleeve shirts, baseball caps, oranges, and water, essentials that provide both comfort and care for those who sustain our community through their labor. Since our founding in 2010, sharing meals has been at the heart of Art Division’s mission. Over the past three years, we’ve focused on supporting local day laborers—neighbors whose work is vital and whose contributions often go unseen. On Friday, students also wrote handwritten notes of gratitude tucked into the lunches, a gesture that was deeply appreciated. The room buzzed with generosity and camaraderie as everyone worked together to prepare and distribute the meals.
Our community could not thrive without the work of day laborers. Their resilience and contributions deserve recognition, dignity, and support. Every lunch we share is a small but meaningful way of saying thank you.
ALIMENTO
Art Division joined with Mi Mero Mole , Alexandria House and the Dodge Sisters for ALIMENTO, a dinner held at Immanuel Presbyterian Church. Art Division Mural Crew created an inspired live painting. We raised enough fund s to provide fifty of the MacArthur Park day laborers with new backpacks stocked with supplies. We will continue to work with Jorge Nicolás from Carecen to supply the workers with the nutrition and necessities they need on a daily basis.
Thank you to all who supported this event!
Printmaking Workshops
Learn, Do, Teach is Art Division’s innovative program that first trains Art Division students in printmaking and then brings them into a community setting where they lead a workshop for children. The program is based on Art Division’s on-going printmaking class and provides advanced students with the opportunity to share their growing expertise with children who have limited exposure to arts education. In 2017, Art Division held a printing workshops in Desert Hot Springs and USC Fisher Museum of Art.
We have expanded the program to include more local organizations and have also extended our reach further into our own community. We have also diversified our workshops to include other disciplines, such as drawing, painting, and creative writing. We are also looking forward to an upcoming project that would will include a portable press, so that we can easily bring printing workshops to almost any location.
We Learn. We do. We Teach.
In 2014 and 2015 Art Division students and staff were invited to teach a week-long drawing and printmaking workshops at the Gadsden Arts Center in Quincy, Florida. The purpose of the workshops was for the Center to connect with the Latino community. On both occasions, the students were very enthusiastic about learning the process of printmaking. The Gadsden experience also allowed our students to teach a skill they learned at Art Division to the kids in Florida. Through this experience, we realized that our students are perfect candidates to teach art in the Hispanic community.
Para Los Ninos - Gratts
After the Gadsden workshops, it was decided that we could provide the same programming in our own community. With art being the first subject being cut from the public school systems, we realized that there are many children in our neighborhood that are not given the opportunity to learn about art. In 2014, we partnered with Para Los Niños Gratts Primary Center, a charter school serving students in kindergarten and first grade.
This school had no previous art program and also lacked an art classroom. We were able to build a program using an existing outdoor space to create a “classroom” that was conducive to accommodating 25-40 students at a time. During the first phase, (semester one) two of our students taught a three month art class based on the Reggio Emilia Approach. One hundred forty students were able to explore different art forms taught by our students. Through increased funding, we are able to currently have four Art Division students teaching at Gratts. To date, 10 of our students have taught at Gratts. Our students are being trained at Art Division in various principles of teaching such as the Reggio Emilia theory, how to organize and create a syllabus, how to approach difficult situations, etc. The training workshops are being conducted by professionals in each field.
Alexandria House
Alexandria House is a transitional residence and house of hospitality. They provide safe and supportive housing for women and children in the process of moving from emergency shelter to economic stability and permanent housing. Art Division has partnered with Alexandria House to implement collaborative projects between AD students and AH’s young children and teenage residents 6-18 (y/o). Participating AD students have exposed the Alexandria House youth to different art disciplines and will be covering a wide range of creative, artistic practices (including painting, drawing, ceramics, photography, filmmaking, etc). A culminating, collective exhibition of the students’ final artwork will be held at the Art Division Gallery.
St. Anne's Outreach Program
Art Division piloted an outreach program at St. Anne’s whose mission is: Working together to build safe, nurturing and resilient families—from pregnancy to parenthood and childhood to adulthood—for generations to come. Art Division provided art classes to the young women of St. Anne’s led by one of our students.
Art Division x Art Center- Socially Engaged Art
Sponsored by the Mary Pickford Foundation, this Designmatters studio teamed ArtCenter Fine Art students with artists from Art Division, a non-profit organization located in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles that serves young artists committed to pursuing and studying the visual arts. As a field that blurs the lines between art and life, the Spring 2018 studio, Socially Engaged Art, emphasized participation, dialogue, and action from a place of shared concerns. The class was formatted to encourage collaboration to foster skills of negotiation, while holding space for individual voices and unexpected innovation within art production. Employing the empowering practice of socially engaged art, student teams created collaborative works that explored social issues and presented their work in a public exhibition entitled “DESC | LISADO: Descentralizado, Desentralisado, Decentralized,” mounted on ArtCenter’s campus and at a Chinatown gallery.
The Art Division Community Bus Stop Project is a collaboration between Art Division and Outfront/Decaux. The project intends to empower artists to re-imagine public spaces and transform the way the commuters experience public transit through art.
This art-activation runs along 6th St (between Alvarado – Vermont) Art Division is also dedicated to community engagement and to building a thriving arts community in the Rampart District.
On October 5th 2019, we held an opening reception and walkthrough of the Art Division Community Bus Stop Project that was open to the public. It was such a great event. View photos below!
Thank you to Outfront/JCDecaux for providing this wonderful opportunity for our students. CLICK HERE to learn more about Outfront/JCDecaux's community activations.
