Although Valéria Miranda’s family didn’t have a lot of money when she was growing up in Rio de Janeiro, her parents made sure to take her to museums, theater, and the opera.
Now, as the director of the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at UC Santa Cruz, Miranda understands that not all of the students who work in the gallery have had that same privilege. To change that, Miranda is expanding a program at the gallery called Art Hustle, which has traditionally provided opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to get experience with gallery work, such as writing introduction panels for exhibitions and cataloguing acquisitions to the collection.
A $18,750 grant from California Arts Council will support “Art Hustle to Go,” a new element of the program that will complement students’ gallery work by also providing opportunities to go see and analyze exhibitions at top art institutions across the region and talk with the professionals there about curatorial practices. Miranda wants students to feel comfortable and welcome in these spaces.
Art for All participants with undergraduate mentors and Institute of the Arts and Sciences staff during a field trip to California Academy of the Arts, 2025.
“A wide variety of these students have had no past access to these types of cultural resources, due to socio-economic status, geographic region, or other aspects of their life experiences,” she said. “That got me thinking that going to college to train in curatorial studies is really not enough. You also need to experience these cultural organizations firsthand.”
With the new grant funding, Miranda will be able to pay artists to do workshops with the students, hire buses to take them to visit museums and galleries, and pay for extra staff time. The funds will also go to cover the costs of an exhibition the students curate at the end of the school year. And in the summertime, students will apply what they’ve learned to mentoring junior and senior high school students participating in Art for All, an Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) summer teen program.
Art for All recruits undergraduates to mentor high school students in a paid gallery work internship that includes field trips to build artistic and cultural literacy. Funds will help cover specialized training by the IAS for UC Santa Cruz students, in order to support their confidence and success as mentors.
“We’re giving the undergraduates a chance to put into action things that they’re learning, and we’re also giving the high school students a chance to see themselves as peers of the undergraduates,” explained Rachel Nelson, director of the institute. “We want the high school students to be able to envision themselves entering into this world in the very beginning of their own career choices, their own education choices, and understanding they can be part of a community.”
Overall, Miranda says the new grant funding will help prepare UC Santa Cruz students to share the power of the arts with others, across a wide variety of settings.
“Our audience here at the Sesnon Gallery is the campus audience and off-campus audience, but then the teens that our students are going to work with in the summer program are a different kind of audience, so they will need to learn how to modify and teach in a way that becomes accessible to many different levels, many different ages and interest groups,” she said. “Especially for students that are coming from low-income families, that all starts with first getting access for themselves to a world of art and culture that they often didn’t know existed. It’s really about access.”