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By Janine Okmin, Associate Director of Education

 

The awardS that started it all

In the early 1930s, during the time of the Great Depression in the United States, a young boy in New York City won a small medal for his drawings upon his junior high school graduation. This honor encouraged him to continue making art, and he received two additional awards during his high school career. Despite family hardship and financial need, he continued his pursuit of art, which eventually led to work as a mural painter, a comic book background illustrator, and ultimately, as illustrator of children’s books that revolutionized the industry. This young boy was Ezra Jack Keats (1916–1983), beloved author and illustrator of children’s books, best known for The Snowy Day (1962), which featured the first African American protagonist in a mainstream children’s book. Keats credited these awards, which he received as a public school student, with motivating him to keep making art.

 

Sunday, April 9, 2017 marked the fifth anniversary of the Ezra Jack Keats Bookmaking Competition on the West Coast, sponsored each year at The Contemporary Jewish Museum (The CJM). In 2012, The Museum presented an exhibition of Keats’ work—The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats—and during the process of planning programming for this exhibition, my education colleagues and I researched the good work of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, an organization dedicated to continuing Keats’ legacy through grants and awards to support public education, the arts, and children’s literature. A signature program of the Foundation is a New York City bookmaking competition for public school students, designed to encourage the art of bookmaking in the public school classroom. In 2012, The CJM had ongoing relationships with our local public schools, but wanted to go deeper. I realized that this competition could be an initiative to create a continuous and robust way for The Museum to collaborate with and support our local public school community and students’ creativity.

After conversations with the Keats Foundation, as well as the NYC Department of Education, I met with colleagues in the San Francisco Unified School District, and the West Coast Competition was born!

 

Looking back on our competition in its fifth year, I’m pleased with its evolution and growth, and the relationship it has created between The CJM and its partnering organizations—San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL), and the Keats Foundation. Each year, The CJM collaborates with the school district to offer bookmaking workshops for librarians and art teachers, introducing techniques they can pass along to students at their schools. This year, we even were able to provide bookmaking “starter kits” to under-resourced schools as well as schools with high populations of English Language Learners, thanks to a generous gift from Blick Art Materials. Again and again, I am amazed by the books the students created. Recent immigrants from China crafted a beautifully water-colored class book comparing life in China with life in San Francisco, middle-schoolers collaborated on a graphic novel, and a fourth-grader incorporated recycled materials into her book binding. A particularly touching entry recounted the story of a boy who found companionship with a dog after a death in the family. These books were displayed on Sunday, April 9, 2017 at The CJM—a day culminating in a celebration and awards ceremony—and are now touring through the city.

 

The sense of pride of the students as they enter The CJM to show off their creations to friends and family is palpable; multiple generations attend the ceremony, and the students are supported by the teachers, librarians, and school principals who encouraged their work. This is truly a culmination of what this program has generated, celebrating creativity, love of books, and the importance of the arts in public education. Though the Ezra Jack Keats exhibition has come and gone from The CJM, Keats’ inspiration lives on in creating a new generation of book lovers and creators, all of whom are supported by the interlocked arms of their families, teachers, peers, and civic community members.

 

About The Competition
2017 EJK Contest Winners
How to Enter
contributors
Janine Okmin

Janine Okmin is the Associate Director of Education at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, where she develops programming for audiences of a variety of ages, develops resources for schools and teachers, and is responsible for training Museum tour guides. Formerly the Associate Manager of Learning Through Art, an artist residency program at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Janine has developed and taught workshops in New York, Boston, Denver, and Taiwan, where she led professional development sessions at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. In addition to working with teachers and children, she has developed arts education programs for teens at the Center for Arts Education in New York City and for college students as the Director of Jewish Cultural and Artistic Expression at Brooklyn College Hillel. Okmin holds a BA in Drama from Northwestern University and received an MA in Arts Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Image Credit

Header image: The winners of the 2017 Ezra Jack Keats Bookmaking Competition at The CJM's award ceremony. Photo by Olivia Smartt.