Our summer camp headquarters are at Art in the Park, a full-service community arts center that was built in the 1920s. It is a unique gem amongst the City of Los Angeles Rec & Parks facilities. It has a shaded veranda, two bathrooms, a music room, a project space and a community space -- and is surrounded by mature sycamores! A large new outdoor play structure is there for supervised bursts of all-out monkey-business during snack times, lunch time and after care. 

Camp days will include:

• Gathering and connection games as campers arrive and we get to know each other

• An excursion to the Arroyo to look for critters, learn native plant names and gather building supplies (salvageable, safe debris)

• Cleaning up our river treasures and working together to transform them into art

• Learning how to connect things together using minimal tools and biodegradable resources like rattan fibers

• Working in small groups to draw and write about what we sense and learn along the river

• Creating word banks to draw from for individual poetry books

• Drawing our discoveries as a way of close observation - then using these as part of our poetry books

• Book-making and assembly

• Movement and collective games

• Clean-up and settling/ reflecting on our daily discoveries

Pack a lunch, snacks, and don’t forget their water bottle!

QUESTIONS? Please contact camp@lariverarts.org

Have a look at the faces and fun times from our pilot program:

Our pilot Public Art Camp (Summer 2022) supported campers at both Hermon Park and Downey Rec Center creating poetry books, engaging in creative play, and repurposing debris (treasures!) from the River to collaborate on a monumental sculpture held together with non-toxic materials (lashing with rattan, no plastics, etc.) while employing traditional weaving/ lashing techniques. We considered the animal and plant relatives at the parks and built-in habitats for them as we co-created sculptures from river debris. 

Campers responded to the prompt: What does it look like to make art that helps Nature?

METHODOLOGY:

In sessions shaped by regional Indigenous Cultural Practioners (Tongva/ Chumash) and led by teaching artists, youth will learn that social and ecological justice go hand-in-hand, how we are all connected, that Los Angeles has been called Tovangaar for thousands of years by its First Peoples, how the river came to be channelized, and that public art can be transformative!

EACH DAY’S ACTIVITIES MAY INCLUDE:

Book and Zine Making! Our curriculum activates youth voices, narratives and perspectives as they write their own poems using river-related word banks. Campers respond with words and drawings to the plants, animals and other discoveries from the Arroyo to make their own books and zines.

New Games! Words and stories from the First People explain the plants and places here forming images in our minds. Campers may embody these names and narratives in games foregrounding our interconnectedness and our place in the landscape; moving, orienteering and improvising with our teaching artists under the sycamores.

Monumental Media! Hands-on skill-building with assemblage, lashing, and knot-tying. Cultivating transferable skills in place making grounded in location and community-based considerations encourages youth to site their work carefully by tracing solar paths, feeling the wind, learning to read where water flows over the land when it rains and establishing the cardinal points at the site as they work together to build a monumental work of art -- repurposing debris the river left behind.

Freeform Exploration! Child-directed unstructured playtime. We believe that kids in Nature will discover fun and the laws of physics with minimal interference from counselors - who stand by to assist and maintain safety, but mainly just stay out of the way of campers’ organic explorations in this safe and fertile environment.

LA THIS WEEK featured our pilot public art camp in summer 2022 - see this short video!

“This is a good program that should be offered throughout all of our parks!”
— Supervisor Hilda Solis

More photos from our pilot program held at both Art in the Park and Downey Rec Center: