Since Youth in Arts completed our new strategic plan this spring, we wanted to properly introduce our Mentor Artists to our more in-depth model, and to each other. Our artists work directly in the classrooms, so they rarely have a chance to interact. We hosted an “all artist meeting” in August, and it was wonderful to see them talk to, listen to, and learn from one another. Our icebreaker activity was a worksheet that asked the artists to identify a problem in the world today, and how they would use their art form to solve it (using words and/or pictures). The prompt was WITH MY ART I CAN…
Here is Mentor Artist Sophie Cooper’s thoughtful response and accompanying artwork:
“A problem I see in the world today is xenophobia. With my art I can…help people see the world through someone else’s eyes. A film can draw you into an experience of understanding that is registered through many senses simultaneously – sight, sound, emotions. This allows people to get a sense of how another person experiences the world. So often the fear of the unknown occurs by observing another’s experience and not being able to see beyond our own subjective viewpoint.”
Sophie Cooper’s teaches New Media, Media Literacy, Digital Storytelling, and Visual Art. She has been working with Youth in Arts since 2010.
BIO: Sophie’s undergraduate studies were interrupted in 1999 when she joined her brother working as a volunteer for a small organization in Kosovo called Balkan Sunflowers. Arriving only 3 months after Kosovo’s one million refugees returned to their destroyed homes, she began organizing cultural activities with the community’s youth. In 2001, together with a network of artists from Kosovo, she participated in the formation of the Crossing Bridges Collective to organize and annual trans-Balkan music and arts festival. Inspired to document these vibrant cultural events, Sophie began working as a video artist and then went on to refine her skills at the Film Academy of Prague, Czech Republic (FAMU). She then received a dynamic degree at the University of California at Berkeley combining both visual arts and critical social theory. Sophie’s work as an artist has developed hand and hand with her work as a community organizer. She has found that her favorite form of activism is that of visually celebrating the beauty of nature and the beauty of culture.
