Yaz joined Arts Corps last winter as a Classroom Assistant and this year they are stepping up as a Teaching Artist. Recently, they were kind enough to share some of their thoughts, experiences, and practices of being a teaching artist.

“Being a teaching artist to me is being able to have influence and be influenced by the youth without being necessarily in a traditional educational setting”.

Yaz had always wanted to be a professional creative but they never expected to be an educator. To them, traditional educational settings place teachers in a loop, bound by a list of requisites they need to teach in a set amount of time. In their mind, this seemed taxing and problematic, because it often leads to difficult conversation being dismissed in the classroom due to a lack of time.

However, Yaz realized there are alternative routes to be an educator, giving them the opportunity to be someone who can have these difficult conversations, “We all come from different backgrounds. I’m not going to shy away from the experience of your background in comparison to mine. We come from different backgrounds, and sometimes we have stigmas against people with certain backgrounds. We’re gonna talk about that.”

Yaz’s practice centers the power of voice, the power of choice, and teaching responsibility through action. When they set rules, they explain the reasons behind the rule by discussing how each action is a choice and how each choice has consequences for ourselves and others. “I’m not gonna be like, oh, you did this wrong. I’m gonna say we don’t do these things because of this. We should not do that because these are the consequences of that action.”

This also leads to teaching youth how to advocate for themselves and respect others’ boundaries, “I want [them] to be learning how to ask for help. I want [them] to learn to say ‘I’m not okay with that, I’m not comfortable with that, you made me feel this way’”.

Yaz uses art as a way for students to practice their power. When Yaz presents an activity they say, “I’m gonna show you how I do it. I’m gonna give you the tools for that. But then it’s up to you how you wanna achieve that goal. And you might not even want to achieve the same physical goal that I would.”

The most challenging thing about using art as a medium is that a lot of people, regardless of age, view art as a skill or as a privilege.

“Art is a right”, Yaz says, “Everybody has the right to create…[But] a lot of times kids will not pick up a paintbrush, pick up an activity because of that inherent, ‘Oh, I’m not gonna be good at it’. I’m not asking to be good. I’m asking you to try.”

So the focus of their art lessons is not just about improving certain skills, but also about pushing through the fear of failure, the fear of success, the “taking yourself too seriously”.

“In my space I want you to participate, and participation is success. Working through your frustrations is success. I like anything you give me. But I’m gonna defy some things because I want you to see your own progress.”

Challenging what art or success might look like allows Yaz to approach learning as a process rather than a product, recognizing students as individuals with their own needs and skills. For example, Yaz might say, “I wanted you to try tracing it, because this is teaching you how to hold a pencil. I’m looking at how you’re holding your pencil, so I can see if I can correct the way that you do it. Even still, if you hold your paintbrush up here, that doesn’t mean you’re better than someone that holds your paintbrush down here. It’s that you have different versions of control, of how you use your paintbrush.”

For this upcoming year, Yaz wants to lean into the sense of limitlessness that art as a whole has to offer and so for their for first curriculum as a teaching artist they choose the topic of world-building.

“I’m really, really excited to see what comes out of this entire course because I might have painters, I might have story writers, I might have people that build a little tribe of dolls because they have that skill set. I’m just excited to see a new generation of artists that have the freedom of being whoever they want to be, because they were taught the techniques of something, the definitions of something, rather than how you should create with it.”

Something else they’re excited about being a new Arts Corps Teaching Artist?

“At the excuse being a sap, I’ve literally waited my entire life to be this person. It was never a dream that I thought was accomplishable. So like, I’m giddy just imagining being in a space as this version of myself and being ready to be with kids. And I’m just really, really excited to see how my students receive me, and my excitement. I’m excited for it all”. 

Yaz Williams is a multi-disciplinary artist from Raleigh, North Carolina who is Black, AFAB, and queer and as such, their work is centered in Black and Afro-centric standpoints. Some of their practices are graphic novels, storytelling, prints, and stickers. Yaz moved to Seattle in 2022 as a Montessori school teacher and has since worked with South End Stories and LAUNCH. They got a BA in Child Adolescent Psychology from the HBCU, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in order to learn what techniques were historically created as marginalization tools, how to move away from them, and how to better serve BIPOC students. As an artist and a person, they are interested in sustainability, third spaces such as libraries and tool workshops, learning different communication styles, and cultural education. They want to increase their own cultural knowledge and that of others in order to help build a better sense of community. They enjoy visiting new places and sitting in parks.