my name is Rochelle Xavier and I'm an artist and educator from San Diego
California and I was the 2018 artisan resident at the new Children's Museum I
was set up with the task to work with the community to help build a dialogue
on race identity and then also family origin my experience growing up didn't
really include a lot of activities that were for me and my whole family my
parents were immigrants so they were constantly at work when I had the
opportunity to tackle this challenge and how to make conversations more fun and
easy for families that just really hit home to me
I developed a series of workshops and an exhibition that I helped to curate that
was presented in the community gallery right here in the Children's Museum so
when you walk into the community gallery there's this huge wall with like over
200 images that were hand-drawn by the youth and the families across San Diego
County it is possible to talk about race and ethnicity at a young age we just
have to give people the tools and the space to do it to feel comfortable the
workshops that they provide are really beneficial to the community because they
are able to access a lot of areas of San Diego that might not typically go to the
museum you may not have the resources kind of breaking down the walls of what
it means to see art it should be accessible to everyone
anytime the new Children's Museum really changed my perspective of what it means
to be a professional artist
the new Children's Museum really helped me access my bravery and for me that was
a really big step so something I've really been able to achieve through the
museum is to really expand the workshop to other places in the communities
that's an international project and I really don't think that I'd be able to
have the capacity to like do this type of project without the new Children's
Museum's help so I think the National Medal is a big win for the museum to
really showcase the impact that they've had on the San Diego community and
recognize its rich diversity what we're doing is working do we get these
conversations to to happen and to kind of ignite within our community and I
feel like the community voices are really being heard
you