 The Black School is an experimental art school that combines art making and radical Black history. During my residency with the L.P., the Black School partnered with Brotherhood and Sister Soul. The Brotherhood to Soul is a youth development organization based in West Harlem. We work predominantly with Black and Latinx young people from ages 7 to 22 years old. All of the work was inspired by these two questions we asked our students. What do they love about their community and what do they want to change about their community? We usually associate historical examples of the things we're talking about, like self-determination, health, and wellness. And we also use contemporary examples like Project Row Houses and Stop Telling Women to Smile and Harry and Zapata Carry. So using those examples, we contextualize what it means to be a student of radical Black history and how that looks when you act it out into the world. The impact of the Black School is super critical and important, especially for our young people because that programming is rooted within kind of African and Latinx history, legacy, and struggle. And then also the ways in which we talk about art and talk about organizing with our young people and activism, just being able to have that collaboration, to see the kind of community and networks that are beyond BROSIS is really important just for their overall development as young organizers, as young artists. You know, because I think that the whole idea is for them to grow up to be able to continue doing this work. In the workshops at BROSIS, what we did was we used the history of street families and gang culture and recontextualized it as a radical movement in Black history because that was the inception of it. It was about protecting the community when the police had failed to do so. So we asked the students to think about ideas for changing their community for the better and we used the bandana print as the visual impetus for that. Projects like the Black School is necessary to the world because on one hand it really celebrates and uplifts the legacy that people of color, especially Black folks have when it comes to community organizing and intersecting in art and culture and how that is a way to communicate and engage with community folk and everyday people and in striving for liberation, striving to create spaces that bring joy and that bring feelings of freedom. Whatever the context of the workshop, the content is always going to be about radical Black movements and how Black people can self-determine to change their neighborhoods for the better.