On a bright Tuesday afternoon in front of the Hancock Foundation Building, students assembled huge paper trees and gazed upon sustainability-themed artwork for the Arts & Climate Collective’s (ACC) annual festival.
There, students listened as their fellow Trojans featured their sustainability-themed creations, from murals and sculptures to video games and drawings. Off by the side was a group of musicians who rhythmically played drums for the event’s duration.
The Arts & Climate Collective is a collaboration with USC Arts in Action, the USC Office of Sustainability and USC Annenberg Innovation Lab. Students from seven different USC schools have been awarded an annual grant. The grants go towards a multimedia or community-based project.
“The Arts and Climate Collective is where we want to look at the intersectionality between art and climate justice and really help fuel student-led projects,” said Au Chung, the ACC’s community engagement coordinator.
The grant takes applications every fall semester, awarding students $1,350 and providing “mentorship, programming, and networking opportunities” according to the ACC’s application guidelines.
At the event’s entrance stood a large mural which attendees could draw on to answer the question, “What’s one thing you want to see in a healthy, inclusive, sustainable Los Angeles?” Sprawled across its surface were drawings of trees, whales, flowers and hearts, interspersed with text calling for a cleaner environment.
In charge of overseeing the mural’s creation and handing out the markers was Monty Hughes, a senior majoring in public policy and an intern for the ACC.
“We love to do a co-creative thing like this at all of our events, just to get people thinking and drawing,” Hughes said. “We’re the Arts & Climate Collective, so of course we want people to make art.”
Student artists in the ACC’s cohort of annual grant receivers get to publicly showcase their projects that were funded by the ACC during the festival.
Tucked next to the wall of student artwork, stood a booth for a sustainability-themed video game called Deseo y Diseño. It took three students five months to create the game, according to Sol Lagos, a junior majoring in English and the game’s design lead. The game developers are also a part of the ACC’s 2023-2024 Cohort. Sprawled across the table were various drawings and illustrations that made their way into the final game.
The player follows Chuy, a lifelong Angeleno, as he serves up raspados, a Mexican dish of shaved ice topped with fruit syrup. Players explore the West Whittier-Los Nietos, East LA and University Park communities, except L.A. has been completely reimagined as a sustainable city.
The city is brimming with native plants and trees, with tons of green spaces and walkable areas. Most notably, huge multi-family apartment complexes feature storefronts and bridges and stairways that connect compounds, something Melanie Guevara, a senior majoring in design, said was done to help foster a sense of community.
“I really love reinventing housing,” Guevarea said. “Just trying to find comfortable housing for large families here in LA where they can be comfortable but also it’s a communal base … I liked [the stairways and pathways] because it encourages activity within the unit, but it also allows neighbors to cross the street to converse and have fun.”
“If work is put into it and effort is put into it, it’s possible to be able to reinvent this community … in a very sustainable, very friendly [and] comfortable way,” she said.
While Guevara doesn’t see this reinvention of Los Angeles happening in her lifetime, she hopes that L.A. will eventually implement some of these proposed changes.
The Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation (SCALE) booth, an organization of USC Students using their grant to partially fund a solar community fridge, was operated by club member Grace Zhang.
According to Zhang, SCALE used to volunteer at the community fridge on South Hill Street every week until it got “swept” by the city in what Zhang described as an ongoing issue across the city of Los Angeles.
“And so what we’re doing now is trying to build a solar community fridge based off of one that was built in Koreatown, and build one closer to campus,” said Zhang. “So that we can build a longer term, more sustainable fridge that doesn’t need to be powered by … a local power source.”
Jillian Gorman, a senior majoring in narrative studies, said she went to the fair because her friends had booths, and she was pleasantly surprised by the music.
“[The event] definitely exceeded my expectations,” said Gorman. “I expected there to be a lot more hard science-focused tables, so it was very cool to see how much creative work and humanities were integrated into this whole event.”
The ACC festival is the first event as part of the wider Earth Day celebrations taking place at USC during April.