Booms and baps of old school hip hop echo under the rattling sound of spray paint cans along 16th and Mission street — but the reason for the sound may surprise you.
Youth Art Exchange (YAX) is a community arts organization bridging the gap between young and working artists in San Francisco. Originating in the Mission District and expanding to the Excelsior, the nonprofit has provided hundreds of students with free arts programming every year.
YAX’s Center Director KT Seibert described the program as providing “not your run-of-the-mill standard art classes that you can get in the regular school system.” By compensating students when possible through stipends, YAX offers young artists the experience of getting paid for their work.
“I think it’s especially important to [compensate] youth because those opportunities are very few and far between, but a lot of youth still have to earn money,” Seibert said. Seibert remembers when artists were expected to work for free where payments were forms of experience and exposure. “We do not live in that world anymore, and I don’t want to pretend that we do.”
YAX gets funding through two main kinds of grants: those for general operations like salaries and rent and project-based grants.
According to Seibert, many federal grants that organizations relied on no longer exist. This has led to a shift towards private donors and funding, which Seibert says are less reliable.
YAX has adapted to funding challenges by expanding to create tuition-based programs for adults. The profits go right back to keeping their main objective alive: free arts programming for young artists.
It’s no secret that murals and graffiti are part of the visual landscape of the Mission District and San Francisco as a whole. Alongside darkroom photography, music production, printmaking and architecture classes, YAX echoes the culture of the Mission. This is done through offering high school students an artist-led experience using the wall-bound art mediums of graffiti and mural arts.
“I feel like doing art on a sketchbook or on a piece of paper … just doesn’t feel like enough,” said 14-year-old student Ursula Sterkel. “It’s cool to actually make something big and make it in the real world and make it a real life thing that people are actually going to see.”
Joseph Lopez, a working artist who currently teaches the mural and graffiti arts class, shows students how graffiti has laid the foundation for many well-known artists, including KAWS, who recently had an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
“Graffiti plays a huge part in our culture today,” Lopez said. “There’s so many people in high places and graphic designers and artists that all stemmed from going out there and doing it on their own, whether it’s with a spray paint can or not.”
