In December of 2019, the ICA published Brave: Reimagining Teen Arts Education in conjunction with the 2018 conference Building Brave Spaces: Mobilizing Teen Arts Education. Celebrating ten years of Teen Convenings at the ICA, an unprecedented national gathering to reflect and build upon the knowledge and field-wide progress made in teen arts education over the past decade. This event served as a forum for collaboration and understanding across institutions, generations, and geographies and functioned as a catalyst.
This timely compilation includes contributions from conference speakers and advisors, teens, artists, researchers, program alumni, and museum professionals from throughout the country. Two essays frame a series of interviews, punctuated by photos from the conference, as well as past Teen Convenings. These contributions shed light on current thinking about arts and education systems from a range of viewpoints and areas of expertise and imagine the different roles youth, artists, and institutions can play in the future. The publication by no means aspires to provide the defining answers to the many questions we have on these important topics. Rather we hope it will serve as a catalyst for continued dialogue, reflection, and action that eradicates the inequitable systems and structures of living and learning that inhibit our world from thriving.