RedLine is a proud partner and administrator of the Arts in Society grant. This collaborative program provides grants to both individuals and organizations that use art as a vehicle to promote social justice and community welfare. 

We love highlighting our Arts in Society (AiS) grant recipients and all the unique and impactful projects made possible by their grant.

We’re excited continue this series with the 2023 AiS Grantee: the San Luis Media Project!

Learn all about the San Luis Media Project and their Arts in Society project: Digital Arts Lab Collaboration at Centennial School in San Luis.

Tell us about your organization

In the summer of 2022, a collaboration began between filmmaker Kate Perdoni, Centennial High School principal Kimba Rael, and high school English teacher Helen Seay, after the three had conversations about how to connect students with ongoing media education.

Through a RISE grant, the school had obtained first-class multimedia gear including photography, video and audio equipment, computer editing stations, software, drones, green screen gear, virtual reality and more, creating a new, student-led Digital Arts Lab.

The school developed a Digital Arts elective to ensure students had continued access to learning. The trio made a plan to support daily, year-round Digital Arts Lab access for interested students to connect with self-expression through mentorship opportunities, including bolstering the Lab elective with volunteer and community support.

What started as an idea to support local youth in generation-spanning multimedia projects through the school soon blossomed into a two-year multifaceted program because of Arts in Society. After several months of piloting an in-class mentorship and a curriculum project, the Arts in Society opportunity became available.

The grant was written to support ongoing technical capacity for students, curriculum support, the Lab and teaching staff through two years of in-class instruction with media professionals.

The Arts in Society project set out to create lesson plans for the school’s place-based curriculum, and provided funding for field trips, equipment, and an after-school multimedia program for middle schoolers mentored by high school Digital Arts students.

Tell us about your first project that utilized your Arts in Society grant

Dozens of students have participated throughout two years of the Arts in Society program in the Digital Arts Lab at Centennial School in San Luis.

The class meets daily year-round with after school opportunities. The best part of this program is watching talented students step into their own brilliant ideas.

It has been truly amazing to see the work that has come out of the classes. Each group of Digital Arts students finds their unique creativity and passions within the Lab.

This year’s class filmed videos in and out of school, took photos and portraits, flew drones to capture scenery, wrote and acted in short fictional scenes, edited short videos, and recorded scenes with the green screen.

They wrote fake news casts, made school announcements, and wrote and recorded skits. Students learned modules from photo composition to audio editing and put together individual and group projects to exercise their skills.

Arts in Society brought weekly professional in-class media instruction to the school’s Digital Arts elective, including local and regional presenters like Donna Hernendez of San Luis, who visited class in the fall of 2023 to be interviewed by students.

Donna shared the cultural art form of colcha embroidery, which has historically been used to create scenes of importance relating to local heritage.

Students captured Donna’s presentation with still photography and video and were able to ask questions and dialogue about generational community representation through artistic expression.

Donna related how art forms have represented the community’s history and culture over time and encouraged students to find their self-expression in the narrative of their own work.

This spring, by popular demand, the Digital Arts Lab opened its doors to middle schoolers for a special after-school program.

Mentors from the high school Digital Arts course were recruited to help lead a week-long learning camp about video and photography, including a class field trip to the Stations of the Cross to document the town. Students experimented with green screen, portraiture, and editing photos and video.

At the end of the week, parents and families gathered for a pizza party to see the finished video and to print and frame student photography. The popularity of the after school program with this year’s middle schoolers stirred up interest to fill next year’s class.

At the end of each school year, students traveled to Denver to take part in a media-centric field trip including stops at Rocky Mountain PBS for a studio and Master Control tour and a visit to Meow Wolf. In 2024, students visited Redline to meet local practicing multimedia artists.

They asked questions about the stories behind the artist’s work, how artist chose and navigated their career paths, and even had a chance to share their own work. Today, several Centennial students are interested in advanced independent study and media internships extending beyond school.

What was your experience like when applying for Arts in Society? What tips would you share with artists looking to apply for an AiS grant?

When we applied for Arts in Society, our project was in a pilot stage and our partners were in place. We had done the ground work to make sure the collaboration could work.

Proactively organizing a project for us meant that many of our initial questions had been ironed out and addressed in the early stages of implementation.

When the time came to draft a budget and proposal, we had a good idea what we would make a successful program, and didn’t have to search to put together the elements.

My advice, although not always feasible, is to pilot your program in a micro way in order to make the details more tangible and less hypothetical for a full-scale grant proposal.

Having experience with a project that was in motion created a strong narrative and the opportunity for partners and supporters to step forward to say that the collaboration had proof of concept.

We’d also tell folks to rely on the expertise of the RedLine staff and Arts in Society grantee cohort. It was incredible to meet artists and program managers from across the state as part of Arts in Society.

Meeting with fellow teachers and creating expansive dialogue around our work resulted in relationships that are important to our project today.

RedLine offers a unique gift in connecting community-driven workers from Arts in Society projects across organizational models, geographic regions, and platforms.