LGBT Youth Art Show
Art provides for us a method of showcasing our inner joys, fears, brilliance, and stubborn realities. It hands us a way to rip off the veil of convention and bare personal truth to be laid out for subjective interpretation, but if we aren’t provided the luxury of the resources to create art or space to have its honesty showcased, then what voices and experiences are we missing out on?
As our youth-led programs have expanded, our youth asked us to have a Youth Art Show, and we said, “yes.” Pride provided the tools, training, and space to highlight youth voices through art at a show they called “Reflections” where they bore out their hearts to reveal to us the realities of LGBTQ youth experience through the lens of individual art.
This year, they asked for the Youth Art Show’s theme to be “Revolutionary” a look at the LGBTQ revolution through the eyes of young LGBTQ artists. The work that has been brought in is deep, compelling, and inspiring.
When done with intention, the use of art, poetry, and music can truly be a revolutionary act. Creating civic and artistic spaces where the LGBTQ community can be comfortably and authentically themselves is a social justice issue.
We hope you’ll join us this Saturday for the art show, later this month for OUT at the Opera, later this year at the Pride Festival, and all throughout the year as we, through our many forms of art, Persist with Pride.
Fernando Lopez is the Executive Director of San Diego Pride. Lopez’s years of LGBT advocacy, nonprofit management, public education, diversity consulting, media relations, guest lectures, and organizing have made them a consistent presence ensuring the struggles of the LGBT community are ever visible.
