All artists exist within a larger ecosystem of creativity. Artist Ward Shelley’s timeline-inspired paintings and prints of interrelated people, places, facts, and events visualize this ever-evolving cultural milieu on mylar. His subjects range from politics and the evolution of science fiction to downtown New York’s counter- and sub-cultures. These works are both complex and beautiful, but they are also unique in part because his gallery prices them based on the arduous, sometimes years-long research required to develop them. This pricing calculation is antithetical to most galleries and artists; typically, until an artist’s own market is truly established, the amount their work sells for is determined by its size.

Like the works themselves, Shelley is more interested in the ecosystem of the arts than in profit. He often makes multiple versions of a painting—and produces and sells editioned prints—as he continues to discover new connections and histories about his subjects. “Sharing information is the most important aspect of making art to me—at times I send hi-res image files of works to those who ask,” Shelley has explained. “I rely on the trust and honesty of friends and peers who ask for files, hoping they won’t turn around and sell the file to a company that will mass produce and sell prints without my knowledge … but I’m willing to take that risk, since I’m more concerned with sharing than selling the information and images I create.”

As an artist, art consultant, and director of the Patty Disney Center for Life and Work at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), my life and work revolve around not just art and its creation but also the economic sustainability of being a contemporary artist. For my colleagues and me, who essentially function as a career services office, that means acknowledging that artists of all disciplines—from music and film to fine and performing arts—enter the art world as entrepreneurs, working as their own managers. Each individual artist must design their own strategy to chart a path to their own definition of success. Some endlessly search for the nonexistent guidebook, while others use the journeys of artists before them as a guide. Most approach lifelong creative careers with endless curiosity and innovation, making it up as they go.

It can be tricky for emerging artists to ascribe monetary value to their work—and to balance the importance of its financial worth with a multitude of other personal, cultural, and creative values. There have been plenty of articles published on the production cost of Urs Fischer’s “You,” a 38-by-30-by-8-foot excavation of the foundation of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise gallery in New York in 2007—$250,000. What is its value, and how does one price (and sell) a hole in the ground? I can’t find the retail price, which isn’t surprising—partly because of the piece’s nature and partly because that’s how the art world works. Until a piece enters the secondary market, and especially if it’s being sold by one of the top 10 galleries, regular people probably won’t be able to find out what it costs. This is one of the reasons the largely unregulated art world appears to be elitist and opaque. That is changing slowly, and in part due to new technology: The online brokerage and search engine Artsy and other platforms make works and prices public and accessible to everyone, even though galleries can still choose not to list artwork prices on the platform.

“Work, Spend, Forget (Dissected Frog Polemic)” by Ward Shelley (2013). Courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Gallery, New York.

Art tends to make headlines beyond art publications only when the market determines astronomical and seemingly absurd monetary values. But in our line of work, we always keep in mind that the artists we’re training create work that has different kinds of value: in activism, decolonization, politics, privilege, gender disparities, identity, and so many other aspects of economics, sociology, and consciousness. And sometimes they bring value to the art world itself. David Hammons joined New York City street vendors to create his 1983 Bliz-aard Ball Sale, selling snowballs of various sizes to passersby. The work comments on the absurdity of the art market, questioning class, race, and capitalism. Today, art schools around the country teach Hammons and his work, which continues to push boundaries and make waves, as examples of both conceptual brilliance and biting societal critique.

Even as arts educators spend a great deal of time exploring how art reflects and refracts the issues of our time, many institutions still consider it unnecessary to educate students about how to actually make a living as an artist. They neglect practical skills such as marketing, budgeting, and communications. Yet artists all over—who have immediate, nearly free access to a global audience—need these skills, which allow them to take control of their sales and networking strategies. That, in turn, increases their visibility and the chance of securing a show, grant, fellowship, or residency anywhere in the world.

This is the arts ecosystem into which I am trying to prepare students to enter—one of opportunity, access, innovation, and excitement. My job is in part to help them feel prepared and confident to use the tools available to challenge the status quo and move the cultural needle forward.

Many of the students are teaching me in the process. In fall 2022, recent CalArts MFA graduate Eliot Burk, a composer, presented his final recital, Seven Strategies for Ending Music. The performance had several parts in several locations, and included volunteers destroying nearly 300 instruments, already in various states of disrepair. I was among the audience members watching as they dropped or hurled saxophones, guitars, clarinets, cellos, and other instruments over the campus balcony outside of CalArts’ Herb Alpert School of Music, to crash against the concrete slab below.

The piece critiqued the field of music as a whole and the human-object relationship that creates sound. I was strongly moved by the entire performance and happening; to me it was a beautiful sensory, meditative experience. But the loudest initial audience response emerged from assumptions surrounding the value of the instruments—the objects—rather than the intention of the project as a whole. But what if, rather than thinking of art and the people and objects that make it in terms of monetary value, we looked at this performance as just one part of a Ward Shelley ecosystem? An art world where we don’t deny that things—supplies, time, and higher education—cost money, but where we also recognize the value of creativity is fluid, subjective, and does not always translate to currency? That is an art world I want to help cultivate, and participate in.

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In retrospect, successful ventures often seem inevitable. But it has been my experience that excellent notions often fail to take hold and prosper, especially in the arts. For that reason, it may be helpful to provide a short history of the program, explore its rationale, and discuss some decisions that led to its ongoing success.

Originally called The National Poetry Recitation Contest, the now more evocatively named Poetry Out Loud is a partnership between three very different sets of organizations—the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), the Poetry Foundation (a private non-profit), and State Arts Agencies (state government bureaus). The NEA created the program’s curriculum and materials in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation, and it distributes them free to all participating schools.

Students choose the poems they wish to memorize either from the free classroom anthology or the Poetry Foundation’s special website, which offers 700 diverse selections. Beginning with classroom competitions, winners advance to individual school contests, then to city, regional, and eventually state finals. The state winners come to Washington, D.C. for the national finals.

There are prizes and certificates awarded to winners at each level, with the largest prizes distributed at the final competition. The national champion receives a $20,000 scholarship, with second prize earning $10,000 and third place $5000. The national champion and several finalists usually return to Washington to perform in the NEA’s literature pavilion at the National Book Festival.

Poetry Out Loud began at the NEA as a personal project. As the first poet ever to chair the agency, I was concerned about the declining audience for serious literature, especially poetry. Having grown up in a working-class home where poetry was enjoyed and recited, I had never accepted the notion that poetry was an elitist art whose pleasures were available only to intellectuals. I had long felt that poetry’s diminished popularity was at least partially due to the way it was taught. One can learn many important things about a poem through critical analysis and term papers, but simple enjoyment is usually not one of them.

When I look back on what created my own appetite and appreciation of poetry, two early experiences stand out. The first was my mother’s habit of reciting or reading poems. She was a Mexican-American raised in brutal poverty who had never gone beyond high school—exactly the sort of person the literary establishment usually assumes has no interest in the art. She knew dozens of poems by heart—Poe, Byron, Whittier, Tennyson, Kipling, and Shakespeare as well as mostly forgotten popular writers such as James Whitcomb Riley, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Robert Service, and Eugene Field. It took me years to understand how deeply her favorite works connected to the private joys and sorrows of her life.

The second experience occurred a few years later in eighth grade under the tutelage of Sister Mary Damien, a small but formidable nun. One day early in the school year, she complained that she could hardly understand a word I said and told me to stay after school. There I discovered that I was not the only notorious mutterer. I found myself with three other boys—all of us Mexican-Americans raised mostly among non-native speakers.

We expected to be yelled at. Instead, the assiduous sister announced that we needed basic elocution lessons. Three days a week after school, she worked with us to improve our speech. The lessons soon took the form of listening to recordings of actors reciting poems and then memorizing and performing the poems ourselves. She pushed us to achieve the same clarity of speech and emotional expressivity as the actors. In that pursuit we failed notably, but we did improve greatly from our mumbly beginning. More importantly, we loved hamming it up and belting out Tennyson and Shakespeare. Without knowing it, she also nudged me toward a life of poetry.

What strikes me about both these life-changing encounters with poetry is that neither came from a book. They were primarily oral, auditory, and performative. Poetry was a social rather than solitary activity—something to be shared with family and friends.

For most students, the impact of participating in Poetry Out Loud is not solely or even primarily literary. The program resembles music or sports more than English class. Poetry Out Loud revives the ancient art of memorization, which was a central element of education until very recently. By studying and reciting poetry, students learn to master language as well as develop skills in public speaking. This practice also helps builds their self-confidence and expands their knowledge of literature.

The very process of reading through many poems to find the right ones to memorize can prove a catalytic experience for many students. Choosing the right poem may even help some students address inner needs of which they are not yet entirely conscious.

Poetry Out Loud began as an idea for a national recitation contest, but ideas are fragile things. To grow into something large and effective they must be developed carefully and subjected to ongoing critical evaluation. Any national program needs to be tested locally before it is expanded. The National Poetry Recitation Contest, as the program was initially called, first reached the public in early 2004 as two pilot programs in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Only one of the tests succeeded.

In Chicago, the competition was established as an after-school program. Without the regular structure of English class and the oversight of teachers trained in literature, the program lost focus. The participation and public response were so poor that the Poetry Foundation felt that the program probably did not merit further investment.

Meanwhile in Washington, Daniel Stone and Cliff Becker of the NEA conducted a pilot program in ten local high schools. Teachers took ownership of the program, and it proved an immediate hit with students. Participation exceeded our highest expectations with over 4,000 students entering the competition and teachers enthusiastically embracing the idea.

As the Washington finals approached, we learned of the poor results of the Chicago test. I phoned John Barr, the President of the Poetry Foundation, and asked him to fly out and see the Washington finals, which were to be held in the Folger Library’s elegant Shakespeare Theatre. We wanted him to see another city before making his final decision. Barr graciously agreed to come.

That evening in the Folger, the 10 finalists took their turns on stage reciting Yeats, Donne, Dickinson, Pound, and Brooks and the audience was reminded of the primal magic of poetry. There was nothing dutiful in the recitations. Some students performed better than others, but they all displayed a significant quality in common. The students quite literally embodied the poems, and the authenticity of their connection to the words was often startling.

The Folger audience was visibly engaged from start to finish, something I have noticed consistently at all Poetry Out Loud competitions. There is a special attention people—both competitors and spectators—bring to competitive activities. That evening I noticed something else that has struck me at every subsequent competition I have attended—namely how diverse the finalists were. They came from every cultural and ethnic background with a disproportionate number of first-generation Americans. They also comprised every type of high school kid—jocks, scholars, actors, debaters, slackers, class clowns, hipsters, and loners.

Having escaped one cancellation notice, the program soon faced another. The Arts Endowment felt that the best partners for the competition would be the State Arts Agencies, the official public institution in each state dedicated to arts and arts education. The state agency executive directors listened to the idea positively—not with great enthusiasm but with interest. But the state arts education specialists insisted that students would not willingly memorize poems, that teachers would reject memorization as an antiquated, even repressive technique, and that competition was anathema to arts education. They suggested that the NEA should create a program in which students would gather to read their own original poems without judgment—“no winners or losers,” one specialist said, “just sharing.” We worked very hard to build a consensus to go forward.

Once the national program got underway, the negativity almost immediately vanished. Initial participation was excellent with 100,000 students competing in the first year. Reacting to the competitive nature of the program, the media gave Poetry Out Loud the level of attention it usually bestowed on school sports. Many State Arts officials, whose good works had mostly gone little noticed for years, excitedly reported that mayors, state representatives, and even governors had become enthusiastically involved in the competition.

Poetry Out Loud demonstrates that large and ambitious literary programs of the highest quality are still possible. Properly planned and executed, they can succeed with both artistic integrity and broad democratic reach. There is now so much fatalism among American intellectuals and academics about the decline of serious literary culture. Poetry Out Loud demonstrates that a hugely popular program can be launched and sustained nationally—even on a relatively small budget.

Poetry Out Loud has also expanded the conventional strategies of literary funding. Before Poetry Out Loud, virtually all of the Art Endowment’s support for poetry focused on assisting its creation—fellowships for poets and translators, subsidies for presses and magazines, artists’ colonies, poetry organizations, etc. However, the audience for poetry has declined substantially. Between 1995 and 2002, for example, the percentage of the U.S. adult population who read any poetry fell by an alarming 30 percent, from 20.5 percent to 14.3 percent—almost one third of the audience vanishing in less than a decade! The 325,000 students who participated in Poetry Out Loud probably constitute a group almost as large as the core adult readership of American poetry. As the program continues across the next decade, its alumni will number in the millions.

Culture is not a marble museum; it is human energy. The true value of Poetry Out Loud is the sound of a young man or woman speaking the words of a poem he or she has chosen to learn by heart. Standing in a classroom or auditorium, among friends and family or strangers and competitors, the student momentarily becomes the embodiment of culture. Poetry has no better bridge between past and present, poet and audience.

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I took his words to heart, and have never let them go.

I have never let South L.A. go either. I grew up in the middle of the Crenshaw-Baldwin Hills-Jefferson Park area, otherwise known as Black Los Angeles, a place that punched way above its weight as a center of black life in the United States at the time. Often when whites write (sometimes to great critical success) about Black L.A., they describe it as the sum total of its self-inflicted pathologies, rarely seeing the beauty of the particularity of life there or the complex intersection of class and intraracial conflict.

Sure, I got my ass kicked, and occasionally guns we’re pointed in my direction, but that could happen anywhere in the city of angels. The Black L.A. I grew up in is a moveable feast of memory.

My memories of growing up in Black L.A. are trips to Playa Del Rey beach and Griffith Park. My dad worked nights at the post office, and so he would take me and the neighborhood boys and girls all about the city on a regular basis. It was a one-man Boys and Girls Club. I’ve written many stories about Googie and Onla and the other knuckleheads I hung out with. I still think about the polite criminality and comic mayhem before rock cocaine came to town like an ill wind that kind of ethnically cleansed black folks who fled to the high desert or back to Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi.

I remember going shopping with my mom at the Boy’s Market on Crenshaw when Crenshaw was still Japanese. And I remember hanging out in the magazine and book section and being terrified by Alfred Hitchcock short stories. Later I discovered that Japanese magazines had naked women in them but no one seemed to notice my 10-year-old self panting with excitement.

The nearby Holiday Bowl bowling alley was probably the only place in the world where you could get sashimi, hot links, grits, and donburi under the same roof. I was lucky to live on the edge of everything—the shining affluence of Baldwin Hills and close enough to the heat of working class neighborhoods. In 1964 we moved to a neighborhood of New Orleans expatriates, and I attended Holy Name of Jesus Christ Catholic Church on Jefferson. I attended their elementary school for just one year because a nun there decided that I was mildly retarded. My mother threatened to rip the veil off of the nun and I was sent to a public school to study with the heathens.

Jervey Tervalon, left, with a friend.

Long before Beyoncé, we were ensconced in celebrity culture in that South L.A. sightings of Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Richard Pryor weren’t uncommon, and Jim Brown was known to crash a party. Who didn’t know someone who danced on Soul Train? Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his father on Fourth Avenue, walking distance from my house. And Jim Kelly, of Enter the Dragon fame, courted a lady on my block, though my friends and I would barely look in his direction because we thought he might round house kick our little pootbutts.

If you hung around long enough you’d end up in a movie, like my older brother who had a moment of fleeting fame in The Spook Who Sat by the Door. A casting director found him and his buddy in the unemployment line and needed some “high yellow niggers” for a few scenes for an important and complicated plot point involving passing as white and a bank robbery. My mom even sewed my brother’s dashiki for authenticity’s sake.

I had my distinctly out-to-lunch buddies; we carried staffs and wore flowers in our hair and, like Kwai Chang Caine meets afro hippies, we walked barefoot—and talked about science fiction and the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft incessantly. Perhaps not everyone is up on Afro-Futurism—that school of thought that values black speculative fiction as a necessary means to understand our current and past situations (though I think we thought of it as Afro-Presentism). Understanding white privilege in its myriad forms should be something you can get a Ph.D. in.

I had a great liberal arts education once I got to college, studying with the literary critic Marvin Mudrick—who understood that being raised in a real neighborhood meant you sometimes got beat up. My formal education meshed well with the idiosyncratic education I had before. Mudrick’s love of Chaucer became mine, and my love of Richard Pryor became his admiration. It’s the crazy complicated formula of one’s birth culture and its intersection with whiteness/European-ness and all the variations plus the breadth of one’s reading and interests. That’s how I thought of myself growing up weird ass Jervey, that dude who reads a lot and writes.

I also flew model rockets, studied martial arts, and loved science. I worshiped fan-boy culture: Dracula above all else, science fiction and Lord of the Rings, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Ishmael Reed’s “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” Canterbury Tales, and millions of comics.

Later, when I did more traditional study of literature, my love for reading everything served me well. The canon couldn’t harm me or make me feel like an alien in my own skin—I took what was useful to me and ignored the rest.

I became a writer and teacher. Now, after teaching for over 30 years at almost every level of schooling, at some of the poorest and some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in Southern California, I’ve learned this: every teacher who ever meant something to me was passionate about his or her area of expertise, was generous of spirit, was honest, and made things.

It is hard to quantify these things, the metrics of creativity, but creativity and creative schooling can happen anywhere. Good, enthusiastic instruction. Decently paid, respected teachers. Students who feel respected and challenged. And a reasonable school environment. These are the essentials, but one can make do.

When I go back to South L.A., I teach junior high and high school students at USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative Saturday Academy. The academy is one of the enhancements NAI offers the kids in its seven-year program to prepare low-income students for college. (Those who meet USC’s admissions requirements get a full financial aid package). These are kids of color who can get into elite schools because NAI creates the kind of advantages an affluent kid has.

I’m glad for my uneven and even perilous inner city education—it made a reader and writer out of me. And so I do my best to entice NAI students to be passionate writers and readers. I flatter the ones who rise to the challenge and admonish the ones who don’t, even if they’re killing it in STEM courses. NAI and my organization, Literature For Life, give a $1,000 prize to the ninth grader who writes the best short story at a USC community school; we want to expand it to all public schools in L.A.

Too often these days we test kids like lab rats and torture teachers to achieve results that justify their jobs. I think of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” and the power of saying “I would prefer not to.” I will not participate in a process that makes it impossible for a teacher to generate passion in students for reading, that values teaching to a test over the possibility of working to engage students in creative construction. STEM is necessary but so is reading widely and deeply. I want these kids to know the pleasure of reading Kafka and then being shocked that when they’re in biology, they remember The Metamorphosis and wonder about the nature of existence.

These Latino and African-American kids remind me of myself when I was in school, which happens to be the same school—Foshay—that I attended back when Foshay was a junior high and a tough place to be a student. Now Foshay is a K-12 school that produces students who get into USC, the UCs, Stanford, and Harvard. Many of them are the first generation in their families that will go on to college, and they look like me, and many of them are confident in their intelligence and wit.

They are their own weird-ass selves.

The post A South L.A. Novelist on Why He Teaches Kids It’s OK to Be Weird appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

She was similarly capacious in talking with UC Irvine English professor and former L.A. Times national correspondent Erika Hayasaki, at an event sponsored by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. The conversation was “bouncing,” said Allen, “all over like a microwave,” in front of a large, often laughing crowd at the Petersen Automotive Museum.

Hayasaki opened by inviting Allen to discuss an upcoming piece she wrote, choreographed, and directed at the Brisbane Festival in Australia—a fusion of dance, film, and theater called Freeze Frame.

The story is set in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, explained Allen, and is her reaction to the senseless gun violence she’s read and heard about since she moved here to act in Fame. Freeze Frame opens with a young man robbing and killing a storekeeper, then moves to the police investigation, which ends up taking the life of a different young man, and then explores the stories of young people in the neighborhood. It’s a piece that entertains, it’s got great music, it’s even funny, said Allen. But it also—as theater is supposed to—makes you “think and feel and maybe calibrate your life” in order to find out where you fit into the world.

Hayasaki asked Allen to explain the origins and inspiration for the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, which Allen founded in 2001 to teach dance to young people in L.A., and which today brings together dancers from all over.

Allen explained that, while growing up in Texas, she wasn’t allowed to attend ballet school because she was black, so she moved with her mother to Mexico City, where she could train—and where there wasn’t the same pervasive racism as in Texas. Allen recalled eating hamburgers at a Mexico City Woolworth’s for the first time with her sister (the actress Phylicia Rashad): “We thought we were at the Ritz in London. … It was the most amazing thing in life.”

“The word is access,” said Allen. “There’s always going to be an uneven divide in terms of economics. But access.” After her own daughter had to leave Los Angeles to train as a dancer, Allen made it her mission to create a dance school that would serve the region and provide access to aspiring dancers of all backgrounds. Today, 70 percent of students at the academy are on scholarship.

But most students in Los Angeles and across the country don’t have access to arts education. Forty percent of high schools, according to the National Education Association, don’t require arts for graduation. What, Hayasaki asked Allen, are your thoughts on this epidemic?

Allen recounted how, as a cultural ambassador for dance under George W. Bush, she asked him and the first lady to add the arts to No Child Left Behind. We need balance in education, she said—for a lot of reasons, including the fact that students who attend schools where the arts are offered graduate at a much higher rate. “If we could make everybody take a dance class, I could bring world peace, honey,” she said.

A sense of social justice runs through a lot of Allen’s work. Hayasaki asked her to talk about producing the Steven Spielberg-directed Amistad, a film that took her 19 years to get made. Allen told the story of how she discovered the largely unknown story of a slave revolt (that ended up spurring a U.S. Supreme Court case) in a book of essays. She felt like it was her responsibility to share the story with as many people as possible—and that the way to do it was on screen—so she took it to people all over Hollywood. She could get a meeting with anyone—“everyone loved little dancing Debbie”—but they couldn’t connect her and the project: “‘Is there any dancing in it?’” they’d ask. Eventually, Allen got the film made with Spielberg, and shown all over the world, including around Africa. It was a lesson in persistence and commitment.

Allen also has had to break barriers as a female director. She said that lacking fear, possessing creativity, and doing her homework have been the greatest assets in earning the respect of her colleagues. She recalled how an experienced director of photography told her he wasn’t going to be able to light a scene where she had “the whitest boy dancing with the blackest girl.” But she told him he didn’t have a choice—and he figured it out. Sometimes, she said, not knowing everything can be a good thing. And people want direction—even James Earl Jones, whom she directed onstage in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; every day, he asked her for notes, and every day she had notes for him.

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked about the arts in L.A. schools, her family roots, and the nature of fame today.

What people or organizations in Los Angeles can supporters of the arts in schools shake up or get behind?

We need to form a committee and go to school board meetings downtown, Allen told the audience. And the effort has to be grassroots. “We have to call out the people we elected,” she said. “We should have a protest and block off the 10 Freeway”—but it should be a positive protest, with dancing and cheering for the arts. This is Hollywood, said Allen; we have no business cutting the arts out of our schools.

Another audience member asked Allen to share her mother’s secrets to raising such talented children.

Allen said that her mother, who turns 90 in July, was an artist herself—a pianist and a poet. She told her children that they had power and they were the best, but she was also unrelentingly tough on them. “She continues to make us know we haven’t gotten there yet,” said Allen.

Is the changing nature of fame today—where social media like YouTube can make anyone a star—lowering the expectations of the young people Allen works with?

“The standard of fame got lowered,” said Allen. “You become famous on a reality show if you eat a frog. Is that talent? If you lose weight, you become famous.” At the same time, social media is “the language of today, of right now.” The kids I’m trying to raise, she said, understand that there has to be more beyond just yourself.

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We students had no idea what exactly we were going to get out of this experience. It was new, innovative, exciting, overwhelming, scary, exhilarating, and (like the arts we would study) full of “Ummm …” and “Well let’s see what happens if ….” Combine the matchless energy of the students, the formidable presence and training of the faculty, the dedication of the staff, and the limited but committed resources of the founders and the county school board, and we had a formula for awesomeness that could not be found anywhere else.

Prior to that first day, we had to apply, audition, and commit to rigorous academics and artistic training. The auditions were not run-of-the-mill; they were seriously adjudicated, rigorous, and comprehensive evaluations of talent, knowledge, and potential. Of those who were selected, some students came with family lineage in the arts, some with no family history other than a dream. Some came from well-heeled homes and others from struggling families. But we all came with awesome gifts, tenacious spirits, and unquenchable thirsts for everything this school could throw at us.

Let me set the stage a little more. The county school board had determined that this school must excel not only artistically but also academically if it was to continue being funded. Half of our day was committed to academics, and the latter half was devoted to artistic training and preparation. Many of us called LACHSA L.A.’s answer to Fame (the New York City School of Performing Arts); but we were reminded often that we were not in competition with other schools and that our focus should be on getting the best education we could so that we could succeed in life. There was no pretense that all of us would go on to superstardom—or that any of us would—but we were expected to take the lessons and apply them throughout our lives and become great in whatever we set our minds and hearts to do.

Almost 30 years after opening its doors, LACHSA still has faculty members who have been there from day one. It still gets support from the county school board, from our very own Arts High Foundation, and from alumni and the alumni association. LACHSA has grown from a school with four artistic departments to four core departments with a myriad of cross-pollinating majors that allow for even more specificity in training for careers in the arts. There also is emphasis on how to translate arts training to other career paths.

In those early days, a lot of us faced tough choices. One student who was an awesome dancer and performer got offered a role on a sitcom, but the filming and rehearsal schedule presented an obstacle. The school could not grant so much time off. He had to drop the role or drop out of school. Ultimately he chose to be emancipated and do the show. I think it lasted for a couple seasons, and that was it. I’m not sure where he is now or what he is doing, but the lesson was learned for all of us: There are no easy answers, and we have to make choices and make the best life we can.

Another struggle we faced: Many of us had few, if any, outlets for the kind of arts in which we’d been trained. The students cried out for a musical, for instance, but the school did not have the space or capacity initially to allow crossing of disciplines like song and dance. This was hard for some students. Today, the school has space and resources for musicals and the multi-disciplinary arts.

As with any large-scale experiment, bad administrative choices, ego-driven decisions, and individual arrogance could affect us day to day. But I would not trade any of the pain, passion, or privilege of attending the great Los Angeles County High School for the Arts for anything in the world. We endured, and we learned about ourselves, each other, and the world we live in. Almost 30 years later, we are no longer experimenting but expanding.

In the TV show Fame, Debbie Allen has a famous quote. “You want fame?” she asks her students. “Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying. With sweat.” Many of us would walk around and repeat that quote to each other when things were hard, to laugh, cry, pick ourselves up, and keep working. I never heard a teacher use that quote, but the energy and message from them was even stronger: Now is the time when you put in the work, train, learn, and do your best so that you can leave and be your best. This, along with so much more, is what I have taken away most from LACHSA. And it is what fuels me in my work and art to this very day.

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