EUSD's annual celebration of Art
The Escondido Union School District held their annual smART Festival at the California Center for the Arts last month.
The festival featured 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional artwork inside the museum from students across all 24 EUSD schools, as well as musical and dance performances in the Center Theater. According to Shannon Fralish, the Coordinator of the Extended Learning, Intervention and Enrichment department at EUSD, the museum reported over 2,000 attendees.
Attendees included students, parents, family members, school board members, and other members of the community. Teachers and staff were on hand to provide information about the art projects on display.
Learn more about the origins of the smART Festival or jump ahead to see photos of this year’s artwork.
Origins of the smART Festival
The smART Festival started with smART Fridays in 2013 after Cathy Hamilton, the coordinator of the Escondido Alliance for Arts Education, reached out to EUSD to discuss bringing art programs to their schools.
At the time, Reidy Creek Elementary had been holding a school-wide art festival and a few other schools started to follow. Fralish wanted to see more of this across the district. The partnership with Cathy Hamilton led to a program called smART Fridays at some EUSD schools.
Cathy Hamilton told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2013 that she and other artists had formed the Escondido Alliance for Arts Education in 2010 with the goal of bringing more arts education to public schools, especially low-income schools. According to Hamilton, all EUSD schools used to have an art docent, but over the years, schools came to rely on volunteers through their school’s PTAs, as funding for art education was cut.
The alliance was part of a larger effort to supplement art education in public schools across multiple school districts. Within EUSD, parents and volunteers had been supplementing art programs at individual schools, such as the Fine Arts Volunteer Educators (FAVE) program at Reidy Creek Elementary and “Art Docents” at Bernardo Elementary. But not all schools were able to offer these opportunities to their students.
After years of planning, about 2 dozen artists with the Alliance began teaching visual and performing arts at 7 EUSD schools in early 2013. The first set of smART classes offered by the Alliance included drama for 5th graders at L.R. Green, watercolor classes for Orange Glen 1st graders, pottery classes at the Nicolaysen Community Day School for middle schoolers, mixed-media art lessons for Juniper Elementary kindergartners, and hip-hop dance lessons for 8th graders at Del Dios.
The first smART Festival was planned by the Alliance to become an annual event to showcase the visual and performing arts from the smART Friday program. In addition to visual arts, the first festival, held in Grape Day Park, featured music, dance, poetry and theatrical performances by both EUSD students and community groups, and offered hands-on art projects for attendees. This flyer lists all the planned activities and which schools were included that first year.
smART Festival grows
The 2nd annual Festival in 2014 expanded from 7 to 16 schools and moved into the California Center for the Arts Escondido (CCAE), with the performing arts portion held after the visual arts. By 2016, the Festival included artworks from all schools in the district.
The Festival that was scheduled for March 21, 2020 was canceled due to the pandemic. In 2022, the Festival returned to the CCAE using both indoor and outdoor spaces to showcase artwork from across the district and from all grade levels. See the EUSD article for photos from the event.
smART Festival now
Although EUSD no longer has the smART Friday program, art is taught by teachers across the district at all 24 schools and it continues to be showcased in an annual smART Festival at CCAE. This year’s Festival featured 2D and 3D artworks as well as performances by Ballet Folklorico, the award-winning Ignite dance team, musicians and more. The event was well-attended. The theater for the performances was standing room only. And the hands-on make-and-take artwork table always had a crowd.
The artwork on display demonstrated various styles and mediums.
Several schools had creative projects that made use of repurposed objects.
Ceramic art projects varied by school site and grade level.
Conway art teacher CJ August told me how she incorporates science lessons into her art projects. One class created ceramic bees and butterflies as part of a lesson on pollinators, while another had created turtles, scorpions and snakes when learning about animal defense systems.
Ms. August also told me that these ceramic flowers will be installed later this year in an outdoor garden at Conway.
Several projects incorporated technology, some in unusual ways.
Oak Hill students showcased their photography skills with a Humans of Oak Hill photo collection along a long wall of the museum gallery.
Each photo included an interview with the subject.
In addition to displaying some of their artwork on tables, each elementary school had samples of various student artworks showcased on the wall.
Although the district is facing difficult choices amid budget cuts at the state level, our arts and music programs should be somewhat protected by Proposition 28, which voters passed in November 2022. Prop 28 requires the state to establish an ongoing visual and performing program with allocated funding.