About Exposures

Exposures is a cross-cultural exchange program that establishes the arts as a common language among youth from diverse communities.  Each year youth from Vermont, New York City, the Navajo Tribe in Arizona, and the Oglala Lakota Tribe in South Dakota spend several weeks together participating in the cultural life of a host community and sharing artistic skills and personal experiences with one another. 

Since 2003 Exposures’ summer program has taken place annually on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  Smaller workshops and exchanges have taken place in Vermont and New York City.  The program is currently expanding to include New York and southern Vermont as summer program sites.  Participants will travel between host communities as they engage in an intensive project-based curriculum combining artistic workshops and experiential cultural and community activities.  Traveling youth will work together with local participants to explore and address the same general themes in each of the host community locations.  Participants will gain a foundation in the primary project techniques through intensive skills-based photographic and artistic workshops.  Staff, guest artists and regional hosts will complement these skills as they facilitate short cultural and artistic workshops linked to daily project fieldwork specific to each region.  Through these related field projects in the different host community contexts the Exposures group will develop a body of collaborative work which will be included in a traveling exhibit and a printed program compilation.

Mission

Exposures is designed to increase dialogue about and understanding of our cultural and personal stories. Guided by the principle that positive social and economic change rests on a foundation of understanding and respect, particularly of varied communities and cultures, Exposures creates opportunities essential for youth to cross geographic and cultural borders as they develop and exchange their perspectives, experiences and artistic skills.  Utilizing photography and other arts as a common language, participants from diverse landscapes and communities develop a visual and analytical vocabulary for apprehending their own experience and that of others, and together experience the facility of these tools for personal and cultural expression. Exposures participants are inspired to collaboratively realize their assets, voice their perspectives and experience their capability in contributing to arts, culture and social dialogue.

Through a curriculum based in artistic skills and techniques, cultural experiences and exchange, collaboration, and cooperative living and working situations, Exposures’ youth participants

1. develop creative and critical thinking for investigation and expression of their perspectives and     their relationship to greater social communities;
2. gain positive cultural experience and consciousness, including heightened awareness of their own cultural background;
3. acknowledge, discover and utilize their assets as leaders and mentors;
4. enrich arts, culture and social dialogue, and are valued as contributors by their own and greater communities.

Exposures is a joint project of the In-Sight Photography Project and the Hall Farm Center, both Vermont based nonprofit arts organizations. 

Visit the Exposures website at www.exposuresprogram.org.

CLICK HERE TO SEE STUDENT IMAGES FROM THE 2006 TRIP