art as social emotional learning

See You on the Other Side is an integrated arts program directed by Erika Lutz, dedicated to social and emotional wellbeing of students and surrounding communities.

The pilot program resulted in a year-long collaboration with artists, students, educators, and community in 2021-2022. The mural, a 480 ft long artifact of the collaboration, transforms the entire courtyard of Amarosa Academy, an alt-ed secondary school run by Sonoma County Office of Education in Santa Rosa, CA. An homage to the strange, beautiful, and sometimes difficult transitions the teen students are navigating, the puzzle mural is a visual metaphor for their labyrinth-like journey of inner and outer transformation.

More than a mural, lead artists Erika Lutz, Alina Nuebel, and Kaya Rose facilitated over 100 people to paint the picture of a place to belong, heal, and grow through the spirit of creativity and the art of human connection.

ART as PLACEMAKING

Petaluma River Park is a project stewarded by the Petaluma River Park Foundation to restore riverfront habitat into a new 35-acre public park that connects people, art, and nature.

Kimzin Creative designed Poets to Parkmakers, a wide range of culturally responsive arts engagements, to gather input from communities historically excluded from placemaking, Through multilingual workshops, coloring books, original music videos, concerts, murals, and installations Kimzin Creative facilitated the gathering of stories, values, and visions, ensuring the park reflects the diverse voices it aims to serve. Insights from these engagements were woven into the design and shared through public art, empowering participants to become long-term stewards of the space.

To present the data and concept designs back to community, Erika Lutz, Briona Hendren, and Nikko Kimzin transformed the story, process, and artifacts into Dreamscapes, and interactive exhibit at Petaluma River Park Foundation headquarters and Dreamscapes Unveiling Concert with Kayatta. The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences selected Poets to Parkmakers as a Gold winner in the 2025 Anthem Awards for Community Engagement: Education, Art & Culture Community Space.

Header photo by Victoria Webb

ART as DATA COLLECTION

Journey to the Future is an interactive puzzle sculpture designed by Erika Lutz and Briona Hendren in collaboration with Kimzin Creative that centers the hopes of over 100 high schoolers and their visions of how the City of Santa Rosa should grow through the lens of health, housing, and environmental justice.

The interactive sculpture is a culmination of several world-building workshops themed around time travel and speculative fiction. The month-long collaboration brought local youth into the fold of building a more sustainable, resilient, healthy, and inclusive city through the 30 year General Plan Update. Journey to the Future amplifies the collective voice of Latino Service Provider’s Youth Promotores, ¡DALE! Educational Justice Youth Program, SCOE’s Youth Environmental Justice Coalition, and Roseland University Prep’s Environmental Science Class, and alt-ed students of Amarosa Academy.

In the larger initiative A Future Worth Planning For, Kimzin Creative artists, in partnership with the City of Santa Rosa’s Public Art Program and Santa Rosa Forward, collaborated on a series of a series of arts-inspired workshops to gather valuable input from residents under 24. The data collected from these workshops not only helped shape four new policies for the General Plan but also served as source material for original works of art, sharing the collected visions in an engaging and impactful way. The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences awarded A Future Worth Planning For Gold in the 2024 Anthem Awards for Community Engagement: Education, Art, & Culture. 

ART as HEALING

On October 9, 2017, the Tubbs fire ripped through the Wallace-Riebli Valley, destroying nearly every home and scarring the community in its catastrophic wake.

5 years later, many had rebuilt their homes, some moved out of the area, and new residents moved in. Determined to prevent devastation on that scale again, they also understand that fire will come back as residents living in a fire corridor. Their hope was to learn from the past to minimize damage to life and property, and believe the solution involves a combination of strategic approaches: community education, collaboration, and creativity.

In 2023 residents recruited artists Erika Lutz and Alina Nuebel to co-create a public mural to honor their experience and evolving relationship with fire. With funding support from the County of Sonoma and sponsorship by Fire Safe Sonoma, the artists designed and facilitated three workshops that centered collective visioning, interdependence, and mutual healing. The workshops were designed to engage build relationships, invite dialogue about post-fire recovery, inspire wildfire resilience by sharing trauma-informed education about wildfire safety and the role of beneficial fire on the landscape. The concepts that emerged were translated into designs by lead artists and collaboratively painted by the community as a 4-sided mural as a monument to people, fire, and oaks through the seasons within the fireshed.

ART as EMERGENCE

Texture of Love is an interactive backdrop led by Erika Lutz and youth artists in collaboration with On the Margins and Kimzin Creative to reimagine equitable arts funding in Sonoma County for artists and culture workers. The collaboration centered Asesores, a diverse multidisciplinary counsel of artists who re-envisioned how artists' dignity, belonging, and cultural safety can be better honored in Sonoma County.

The creation of Texture of Love involved a playful and experimental process. Asesores created a texture of “future imprints” using pigment, movement, and objects with deeply personal and cultural significance they wished to call into the future. The texture was woven into a collage of imperfect map of First Nations, lands and vascular networks. Texture of Love is intended to accompany the Asesadores as they expand into the far reaches of Sonoma County communities. An interactive element was designed to become a living texture of visual data that evolves with each new circle it reaches.

Learn more about Arts, Emergence, and Radical Love, commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, to redistribute $500,000 in direct funding to artists and culture workers who have been historically and systematically oppressed.