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de Young Hosts Youth Speaks Poetry Slam
2/17/2006 San Francisco--On Friday, 17 February 2006, the de Young museum hosted the first Youth Speaks District-Wide Poetry Slam for high school students in San Francisco. Students from over half a dozen high schools in the San Francisco Unified School District competed in the de Young’s Koret Auditorium for the title of district champion.
In an effort to create performance opportunities for more Bay Area teenagers, Youth Speaks organized district-wide Poetry Slams hosted by two Bay Area museums: the de Young in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of California in Oakland. The top scoring poets will compete in the 10th Annual Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam Semi-Finals, for a chance to be on the Bay Area team competing at “Brave New Voices - (Inter)National Youth Poetry Slam Festival” in New York City later this year.
Youth Speaks is the leading nonprofit presenter of spoken-word performance, education and youth development programs in the country. Their poetry slams provide an important public forum for young people to make their voices heard.
de Young/Youth Speaks Collaboration
 As part of the Opening Ceremonies for the new de Young museum in October 2005, the 2005 Youth Speaks poetry slam champions Katri Foster, Meilani Clay and Dahlak Brathwaite performed with former San Francisco Poets Laureate devorah major, Janice Mirikatani and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and California State Poet Laureate Al Young. Following this successful performance, the de Young and Youth Speaks collaborated on the first district-wide poetry slam for high school students in San Francisco. The de Young museum has a long history of encouraging young people to participate in the arts and to speak for themselves.
Museum Ambassador Program
In 2004, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Museum Ambassador Program received a prestigious Coming Up Taller award from the President’s Council on Arts and the Humanities. The award recognizes outstanding arts and humanities programs that celebrate the creativity of young people and provide them with opportunities to learn and to contribute to their communities.
Founded in 1982, the Museum Ambassador Program hires San Francisco high school students from underserved communities and trains them to understand and interpret art as a means of building critical thinking and life skills. These students learn to give entertaining, informative presentations to groups of varying sizes that total over 10,000 people a year, both in and outside the galleries. In the process of educating others, they learn to develop their own public speaking skills, reasoning abilities, and teaching styles, as well as building their own knowledge about art and how to understand it. Ambassadorships are paid positions, so students also gain the kind of professional experience that is often denied to low-income youth.
“The program was designed with us in mind, allowing for a working environment in which we felt equal with each other and with the adults,” says Ambassador alumna Stephanie Caldwell, who completed the program in 2001. “This has given me an example of how to be a model employee in future job opportunities as well as at school.”
About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The de Young museum and its sister museum, the Legion of Honor, together make up the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the largest public arts institution in the city and one of the largest art museums in the United States.
The Legion of Honor is located in San Francisco's Lincoln Park (34th Avenue and Clement Street). Its collections span 4,000 years and include major holdings in Rodin sculpture; paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, de la Tour, Vigée Le Brun, Cézanne, Monet, and Picasso, among other Dutch, Italian, German, English, and French masters; a 15th-century Spanish ceiling, European decorative arts, tapestries, and over 70,000 prints and drawings.
Founded in 1895 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the de Young museum has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the city and a cherished destination for millions of residents and visitors to the region for over 100 years. In October 2005, the de Young reopened in a state-of-the-art new building and attracted more than 50,000 visitors during its opening weekend. Designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Fong & Chan Architects in San Francisco, the new de Young provides San Francisco with a landmark art museum to showcase the museum’s significant collections of American art from the 17th through the 20th centuries, art from Central and South America, and from the Pacific and Africa, as well as an important and diverse collection of textiles.
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