Creative Labs 2025
On May 30, 2025, Creative Labs, an 8-week Spring Youth Program in collaboration with Mendez High School, wrapped up with a powerful exhibition of student work.
In collaboration with four incredible teachers and our dedicated Teaching Artists, students explored their creativity through hands-on experimentation, including learning techniques to create prints, illustrations, paintings, bookbinding, zines, and more! The artistic process gave students space to deeply engage and respond to what they were learning in core classes, allowing them creative freedom to express their personal interests and ideas. Below is some of the work these young creators made during 8 weeks in Spring 2025.
The Story of You: Creating Visual Narratives
Watercolor, poster art, relief printmaking, and zines!
Teaching Artist Dalila Mendez with Ms. Wakasa-Mireles’ 10th Grade StudentsThe theme of the art classes for Ms. Wakasa-Mireles’ 10th Grade students this year was “The Story of You: Creating Visual Narratives”. Dalila Mendez, SHG Teaching Artist, guided students in considering how visual storytelling can be used to explore and communicate personal identity and cultural perspectives. They considered how artistic techniques and media contribute to narrative expression and how design elements such as composition, color, and text influence the meaning of a visual work. As an introduction to design elements, students created mandala watercolor paintings. The following week, they expressed personal, cultural, and communal messages on posters, applying techniques like text and stencils, using artist Corita Kent’s silk screen prints as inspiration. Eventually, they explored relief printmaking, studying printmakers’ works and methods, stimulating their experimentation with essential techniques. The class concluded with zine making, where they learned about its history, themes, and form, looking at hard copies for their research. Students then used observations of their neighborhood to inform the text and images that went on their first mini zine. As a culminating assignment, students created a one-of-a-kind 5.5” x 8” zine, using visual storytelling to communicate personal perspectives on their interests and communities.
Students’ Artwork
Communal Printmaking
Using jigsaw linocut printmaking to make collaborative prints
Teaching Artist Pável Acevedo with Mr. Martinez’s StudentsThrough the theme of “Communal Printmaking”, students reflected on the intersection of art and activism, highlighting the importance of collaboration in this process. They looked at linocut printmaking examples, like protest banners that used stencils to print on fabric, or posters, including artworks from SHG archives, the Beehive Collective, and the teaching artist’s portfolio. By learning more about the printmaking process, from brainstorming, to the jigsaw carving technique, to making the communal print, students learned about the significance of autonomy and communicable organization in social justice movements.
Students’ Artwork
Sci Fi Film/ Horror & Suspense Literature
How Art, Storytelling, and Film Techniques Shape Narratives
Teaching Artist Oscar Rodriguez and Teaching Assistant Sabrina Koenig with Ms. Lucas’ StudentsBy blending printmaking, illustration, and film analysis, students discovered how art, storytelling, and film techniques shape narratives, simultaneously using literary connections to amplify these relationships. In Ms. Lucas’ Sci Fi Film/ Horror & Suspense Literature class, students took inspiration from dystopian narratives, like The Others, and used stencil techniques to explore how literal and metaphorical layers construct meaning and perception. Other techniques, like high-contrast ink illustration, highlighted how lines can create mood, especially those popular in classic gothic and psychological horror narratives. Conversely, students used watercolor to examine how soft fluid forms can evoke tension between fragility and power, incorporating elements from stories like Misery or District 9 as a muse. Through relief printmaking, students carved symbols of self-representation and explored how repetition in print parallels themes of forced anonymity and erasure, using short fiction like "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Invisible Man” as inspiration. Other techniques used in this series include chiaroscuro using charcoal drawing, color theory to design speculative landscapes, and storyboarding and scene design to analyze key film scenes. As a culminating assignment, students combined all the techniques they learned and created a collective three-dimensional narrative, inspired by the themes of dystopia, horror, and self-expression.
Students’ Artwork
Student Artist Books as Personal Visual Archives
Teaching Artists Joe Galarza and Natalie Godinez with Mr. McConnell’s 10th Grade StudentsOver 8 weeks, Mr. McConnell's 10th grade students explored a different art medium or activity weekly, which culminated in an artist’s book, whose cover, binding, and content was created by the student artists. In a way, these books perform as a personal archive, visually expressing the students’ identity and culture at the time of production. Throughout the 8 weeks, students made cultural collages, where they reflected on different aspects of their identity. They created erasure poems, deciding what words to keep and conceal. They interviewed each other, mining ideas that could inform experimental self-portraits. They created layered paper cutouts representing their communities, deciding again what to reveal and conceal. These artist books translate students’ memories and ideas into an array of visual forms, commemorating their identities as youth in Los Angeles.
Students’ Artwork
ABOUT CREATIVE LABS
Creative Labs is a partnership between Self Help Graphics & Art and Mendez High School that enhances student engagement by integrating art in the classroom setting. SHG Teaching Artists use SHG’s wealth of serigraphs in its archive among many other artistic examples for visual and historical reference that complements and enhances the English, film, literature, and American History curriculum. The integration of the arts into core subjects concludes with interdisciplinary student artworks that demonstrate various art skills like printmaking, zine making, watercolor, poster art, storytelling, film techniques, drawing, and bookmaking. This program is led by SHG’s Youth Programs Manager Nini Sanchez.