NOT REAL ART, in partnership with parent nonprofit Arterial and creative agency Lunarsol, has launched a new arts education program for incarcerated people across the United States. The project, live now on Edovo—a proprietary digital education platform built for prisons—delivers more than 50 hours of content created and curated by artists, educators, and podcast producers.
"This is a way for us to give back," says Scott “Sourdough” Power, founder of NOT REAL ART and the initiative's lead. "It’s a way for us to help others and do it in a relevant way because we have value-added, educational, informative, empowering content."
Scott explains that the project grew out of conversations with Erin Yoshi, a Los Angeles-based artist, former NOT REAL ART co-host, and founder of Lunarsol.
Erin and other artists had recently been working with incarcerated women, leading mural projects and art workshops within prison spaces. Impressed by the impact, she suggested that NOT REAL ART could further support arts education inside prisons through Edovo, a non-profit that already provides curated digital learning to over a million incarcerated people.
"They were telling me about this opportunity with Edovo to bring arts education to over 1 million incarcerated men and women," Scott says. "Erin approached me to see if we would be interested in licensing or making our content available."
Knowledge is Power: Learning the Art Business With Edovo
Edovo, which is closed to the public and built specifically for correctional settings, typically hosts practical art instruction—how to draw, paint, or sculpt. According to Scott, the new NOT REAL ART program fills a gap by offering lessons on the business of being an artist, covering topics from copyright and marketing to pitching and the day-to-day realities of working in the arts.
"Lunarsol and I worked to create an educational program titled ‘Knowledge is Power: Learning the Art Business,’" Scott says. The program, he added, is "meant to help incarcerated people who are artists or want to be artists, who want to learn about the art business."
After an extensive curation process, Lunarsol prepared and productionized the content for Edovo, uploading it as a curriculum that users can progress through. "It’s all organized in a rational, sensible way," Scott says. "You watch, you listen, you learn, and then you take a test. Once they’ve completed it, that helps them towards their parole, that helps them towards their rehabilitation."
The project is not a revenue driver. "Because Edovo is a nonprofit… this is not a for-profit endeavor for us," says Scott. Lunarsol staff, including Erin Yoshi, Danielle Balderas, and Sarah Baltazar, were integral to the project’s development and curation.
The content is available indefinitely, with plans to expand the curriculum. "We have the opportunity to add content and make more content available," Scott says. Ultimately, the mission is to increase access to arts education and empower those who face some of the steepest barriers to creative expression and career-building.
Featured image: “Faces of Mass Incarceration” by Megumi Nakazawa.