About the author : Mearieta Clemente
Curt’s Cafe received funding from the City of Evanston Arts Council for a collaborative grant between Art Encounter and Curt’s Cafe in June 2025. The grant involves an artist coming in and teaching the students to create art using a specific medium. To utilize this funding it was decided there would be 5 sessions at the Noyes Cultural Center every Wednesday morning, beginning March 11th and ending April 8th.
Each Wednesday the students traveled together to the Noyes cultural center to meet with Nino “Tsel” Rodriguez. Tsel is a street artist, designer and teacher. You can read his bio here. Lea Pinsky from the Noyes Cultural Center was intricate in finding the artist to bring this project to life.
Students learned about the history of graffiti as well as various art techniques that went behind the amazing murals and art pieces that you see. Along with this, our students learned how to create their own identity through graffiti arts. During classes they designed their own “graffiti tag” and placed the final piece on canvas to keep. Students thought the experience was fun and engaging. They enjoyed expressing themselves through art, one even saying this was especially interesting as they want to become a tattoo artist in the future. We hope to do more cultural exposure trips in the future and find more ways to inspire our students.
