Report To The Community 2022

why do kids need an
education
in the arts?
stefon harris
explains
speaking out
the city verses project
infused poetry with stories of struggle
Being part of an arts education program
was a life-changing experience for me.
For the first time, I was sitting down
to learn with people who were truly
high-level performers — just as the kids in
NJPAC’s programs do. They challenged
me in ways that no one else ever had.
The thing about learning to play music
is — there’s never only one right answer.
But through music, you learn how to learn.
When we teach children how to perform,
we teach them so much more than
reading notes and keeping time.
At every lesson, little by little, we give them the
tools they need to solve complex problems.
The arts teach the highest values as
well — like empathy. Only in studying
the performing arts do kids get together
and spend hours listening to each other.
And collaboration: When you study the
arts, you’re learning to create beauty
that you can’t create all on your own.
Those are skills that will help
any young person thrive in our
increasingly interconnected world.
Even more than that, my instructors
made me feel seen. They saw my potential,
my ability — not just to get the right answer
on a test, but to find something inside of me
that connected with this music, that brought
something of my own to each piece I played.
It meant the world to me to be seen
and acknowledged that way.
— Stefon Harris, jazz vibraphonist
and NJPAC’s Jazz Education Advisor
Writers and musicians from
across the Greater Newark
community — high school
students to adults — were able
to share their stories through
City Verses, a multifaceted,
multi-year collaboration
between NJPAC and Rutgers
University-Newark.
Although the pandemic led
to most City Verses programs
being held virtually during its
first two years, this season the
program blossomed to include an
in-person summer camp, public
workshops and events in libraries
and poetry readings across the
city co-hosted with the Newark
poetry collective EvoluCulture.
At the City Verses summer camp,
teen poets and musicians, who
had studied together online for
years, were able to collaborate
in person for the first time.
“We had some poets who
started as freshmen, and they
came every year, and all this
time, they were getting taught
by people who were masters
in their discipline,” says Dimitri
Reyes, a Rutgers-Newark
MFA poet who served as a
City Verses teaching artist and
helped establish the curriculum.
Students grasped the
opportunity to make
performance pieces that
addressed potent topics.
“Never underestimate high
schoolers,” says Shannon
Pulusan, another Rutgers-
Newark MFA poet and City
Verses teaching artist. “They
were thinking about the world
with a wide lens, about race,
gender, so many things.”
City Verses also produced
public performances, both
City Verses offered poets and musicians from
across the Greater Newark community —
high school students to adults — a range of
platforms to share their work.
in-person at the Arts Center
and virtual. Poets associated
with the program performed
during the TD James Moody
Jazz Festival, and the initiative
also produced its own virtual
event, a jazz-poetry film called
A Beautiful Bond, that streamed
during the festival. Curated
by poet and educator Vincent
Toro and NJPAC Jazz Advisor
Christian McBride, the film paid
tribute to the ways that Black
and Latinx struggles for social
justice have been intertwined.
“People know about Martin
Luther King, but do they
know of the relationship King
had with Cesar Chavez?”
Toro asks. “Black and Brown
people have been working
together for centuries to
build a better world.” •
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