A 8th grade girl wearing blue jeans and a bright pink shirt walks through the 3rd floor hallway, cautiously peering at freshmen and sophomores lounging on the cat boxes, casually glancing out the wide glass windows at the snow-covered courtyard. She walks to the end, where the hallway meets the 8th grade atrium, and pauses for a moment, surveying the room for her group of friends. It is then that she catches sight of the colorful posters laid out above the lockers. After she has finished scanning each word and drawing, she smiles.

These signs plastered across the white walls feature pink silhouettes of girls holding hands amid expressions such as “re-sisters” and “I’m with her.” These posters are lasting evidence of the May 2017 eighth grade trip to Washington, D.C. in which students stood outside of the White House to protest the policies of the current President of the U.S. The signs that preach words from the feminist movement, include posters created by freshmen Grace Conrad and Nathalie San Fratello.

“We went as close as we could to the White House,” Conrad said. “There were a lot of tourists, especially kids visiting from other schools wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats. When we started to actually protest, other people started to gather that weren’t even from Parker.”

In the adjacent table, freshman club member Rebecca Gross, putting down her pencil for a brief pause from her Cornell Notes, said,  “Bill Nye joined us too! He was standing right behind us.”

Two simple posters have since grown into a larger movement, inspiring Conrad and San Frantello to create the Youth Art Activism Movement Club (YAAM.) This year marks the first year of YAAM, in which the girls choose different activist movements to further discuss global issues—with a twist. Instead of speaking with words, the goal is to make art that can speak for itself. So far, the club has around 15 members with primarily freshmen participants.

Conrad and San Frantello’s passions for inciting change has only grown since their spring travel trip in spring to the nation’s capital. “Over the summer, there was a lot of controversy surrounding LGBTQ in the military,” Conrad said, “Nathalie and I decided to make posters and hang them up throughout our neighborhood, specifically in playgrounds and parks. Most of them said, ‘love is love.’ It became a thing in my neighborhood, and other people joined in and started making their own art!”

This past month, the club announced that their current art “cycle” will be focused on women’s reproductive rights. The two freshman girls have reached out to Planned Parenthood, where their volunteer orientation for club members took place on January 11. “For each topic, we’re trying to do a volunteer opportunity,” Conrad said. “This last topic was reproductive rights, so we thought it would be an interesting chance for anyone who was interested in becoming a Planned Parenthood volunteer to have the ability to do that.”

Being freshmen, Conrad and San Fratello are new to the upper school. “It’s kind of hard being an underclassman,” Conrad said. “Nobody wants to come to a ‘freshmen club.’ We’re hoping it will get bigger in the future. We have a lot of freshmen right now—on a good day we’ll have up to 25 people.”

As many Parker students streamline their interests towards STEM topics, the girls in YAAM are working to keep the arts alive. “I wanted to be a part of a student-lead movement for not only expression, but for opening others’ eyes on equality, diversity, and current political issues,” San Fratello said. “Grace and I thought that creating a safe environment where people could paint, draw, write, and beyond would be a good and academic way to express political topics and concerns.”

Both club heads believe that activism through art is the best way to express their voices. “All this stuff is so heavy,” Conrad said, “but when it’s portrayed through art, you can start seeing new perspectives.”

You may be wondering–Do you have to be good at art to join YAAM? The answer is a resounding “no!” The two girls have also started to incorporate new ways in which the club can share its art. “Most of YAAM is just talking about the topics, and we’re also trying to branch out into photography,” Conrad said. “Plus we’re trying to start a website where we can post our art, so there are tech savvy people in YAAM that are contributing in alternative ways.”

Thus far, the clubs’ main event has been participating in the Chicago Women’s March on Saturday, January 21. “A lot of people from YAAM got together the night before the Women’s March and finished our posters,” Conrad said. “We all went to the march in a big group. The march itself was really cool. If you were a true women’s marcher, you were there to protect the future. Compared to last year, the marchers were less angry, and it was much more positive. It was a space of unity.”

The second annual march through downtown Chicago was a sea of pink “pussy hats” and signs of refound strength—symbols representing Conrad’s so-called “space of unity.” “It was amazing to be surrounded by people who had similar values about women’s rights,” Gross said. “It was awesome to know we were all marching for the same reason.”

The club’s future holds three and a half more years for these two freshmen to continue honing their visions, and developing new ideas.

While thousands of women claim scribbling in black Sharpie pens on poster boards from Walgreens as their contribution to the Women’s March, Conrad and San Fratello have instead launched a whole art movement. An art movement that once started as a bucket of paint brushes and a few clever ideas.snowball effect. And so, from what started as a bucket of paint brushes and a few clever ideas, an art movement has emerged.