Young people are not an afterthought, they are all the future that the arts and culture have. We must make deliberate youth-centered choices right this minute, say Dennie Palmer Wolf and Jeff M. Poulin.
Right this minute there are roughly 42 million adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 in the United States, all making daily choices about who they want to be: choosing elective courses, deciding what to do between 3pm and sleep, riding or walking to destinations they chose, earning and spending money. Some of them are the future of creative work: people who are thinking about being artists, performers, musicians, and writers.
Chances are the current pandemic has them considering whether a creative life is possible – feasible, affordable, open to someone like themselves – at the very moment when that world began cancelling, shuttering, and laying off the teaching artists who was the first person to say to them “Yes, absolutely, poetry (or choreography or set design) could be yours.”
Right this minute there are roughly 42 million adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 in the United States, all making daily choices about who they want to be: choosing elective courses, deciding what to do between 3pm and sleep, riding or walking to destinations they chose, earning and spending money. Some of them are the future of creative work: people who are thinking about being artists, performers, musicians, and writers.
Chances are the current pandemic has them considering whether a creative life is possible – feasible, affordable, open to someone like themselves – at the very moment when that world began cancelling, shuttering, and laying off the teaching artists who was the first person to say to them “Yes, absolutely, poetry (or choreography or set design) could be yours.”
Their creative lives – and ours – hang by a thread... Keep reading on Creative Generation