Published in Sacramento Medicine, October 1994

AIDS is now spreading fastest among heterosexuals. The sexual activity characteristic of high school students makes these years high-risk years and an increasing number of high schoolers are contracting HIV. This makes our high schools critically important arenas for public health attempts to modify high-risk behaviors associated with sex and drugs.

How to do the education is the issue. Many teenagers are turned off by pure classroom-type lectures on the dangers of sex and drugs, no matter how well meaning or scientifically accurate they might be. Sacramento has been fortunate in having developed a supplemental approach that elicited more active attention and participation from the students. The Sacramento Arts Commission conceived of a project involving students in visual and performing art projects on the theme of AIDS. They developed the project with the help of the UC Davis AIDS Research and Education Unit. Sacramento High School, a magnet school for the arts, was selected as the site. Playwright Patricia Pena was commissioned to write a ‘rap opera’, a play with contemporary rap music performed by the students. Local artists Valerie Hernandez and Birgitta McCarthy were the coordinators of the students’ visual arts component.

The students were all volunteer participants with special interests in the visual or performing arts. The student actors rehearsed and performed a play focused on real life dilemmas of students struggling with sexual desires or expectations in the context of HIV risk. The visual arts project consisted of keeping a notebook, painting two personal paintings and a group painting called a "signature square," and participating in an AIDS workshop. The notebook of impressions and rough sketches was used as a reference for the paintings and signature square. The students created their art works from scratch. They built the frame, stretched and primed the canvas. The paintings expressed very individualistic responses to the HIV epidemic.

The painting of the signature square was done as a group effort by the students. The signature square refers to a 12’ x 12’ painting on canvas to be displayed together with the National AIDS Quilt and to serve as an interactive medium on which visitors at the exhibit write their own thoughts and feelings (i.e. signatures) about loved ones or reactions to the quilts. The students worked out a compositional theme and all participated in the execution of the painting. The finished square was displayed at the Sacramento Convention Center with the National AIDS Quilt. More than 1,000 Sacramento area school children saw the exhibit and many of them (as well as many adults) wrote very moving and perceptive comments on the square.

The play was performed three times during the school day to a standing-room-only audience of students. Students were even cutting classes to see the play a second time! An additional performance was done in the evening so students’ parents and friends could attend. Following the performance the individual student paintings and the signature square were placed on exhibit for the rest of the students to see. The play was followed by a dialogue between UC Davis staff, an HIV-positive patient volunteer, and the students which featured the answering of anonymous and direct questions from the student audience.

The drama of the play really involved the students and the rap opera had them rocking in their chairs, and at times out of their chairs. The play focused on the issue of personal decisions and the question of who’s to blame if the catastrophe of HIV infection occurs. The artistic performances created a very natural transition into the discussion afterward. To see such participation in an AIDS education exercise was truly impressive.

AIDS is not an easy subject to educate students about, especially because HIV is intimately related to two very emotionally charged subjects: sex and drug use. One of the developmental characteristics of teenage years is that the advice and information of parents and teachers on just these two topics is often ignored, if not rejected outright. This underlines the importance of student artists and actors dealing with the issues of H1V on their own terms, in their own language, without the authoritarianism and judgmental overtones the students hear in didactic lectures. The student audience’s involvement in the drama and art display broke down their natural defenses against such an open dialogue.

The arts can involve the viewer/participant in a unique and personal experience and so can be a powerful ally of public health in its objective of educating, the youth especially, in a meaningful and personal way about the risks associated with personal behaviors like sex and drug and alcohol use. Our students and community would benefit from more cooperative efforts between the arts, public health, and our schools.