Oakland School for the Arts | FLY

Oakland School for the Arts | FLY

Oakland School for the Arts (OSA) is a nonprofit public school founded by the city's former Mayor, California Governor Jerry Brown. Now in its sixteenth year, OSA serves nearly eight hundred students in grades six through twelve. The school's main campus is housed in Oakland's historic Fox Theater building, with additional classrooms, performance spaces, and galleries located throughout the city's vibrant Uptown District.

OSA balances an immersive arts program with a comprehensive academic curriculum, providing students with unique opportunities for learning, innovation, expression, and personal growth. Serving youth from across the Bay Area, OSA actively recruits through Step-It-Up, a program designed to give underserved youth in grades five through nine access to free instruction needed to successfully audition into the school. Once enrolled, students at OSA engage in a challenging academic curriculum in the morning while focusing on one of ten artistic fields each afternoon.

Students in the School of Visual Art learn to create artwork using a variety of techniques and media, including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and digital design. The instructors are professional working artists as well as arts educators. They train OSA students to become the next generation of creative leaders in an environment that fosters critical thinking, artistic dialog, and creative problem solving.

The work featured in this exhibition was produced by OSA students from grades nine through twelve. Responding to the prompt, "FLY," students worked with a range of mediums from watercolor to collage. Interpretations of the theme not only reference flight, birds, insects, and airplanes, but also the urban vernacular use of the word, as in, "They're so FLY!" .

@ 2018 by the San Francisco Airport Commission.