Embarking on a treasure hunt for the art and artifacts held by the Los Angeles Unified School District is no small feat. 

The nation’s second-largest school district is home to 389,000 students and roughly 100,000 pieces of art, including paintings, sculptures, maps and murals.

The art can be found in schools and district buildings across the district’s over 700-square-mile terrain. It is part of its Art & Artifact Collection, which began sometime in the 1850s and morphed into a multi-million-dollar collection today.

Sure, the collection holds school records — classroom materials, photos, yearbooks. But it also has ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets dating back to 2100 BCE. Sculptures of “Don Quixote” by Salvador DalĂ­ from 1979. A 1931 “Bugs Bunny & Friends” by the animator Chuck Jones shows Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, Daffy Duck and The Road Runner reading a book entitled “History of the 9th St. School.”

The collection predates the official formation of LAUSD in 1961. The city was served by the Los Angeles City School District and the Los Angeles City High School District, which later . Most of LAUSD’s notable pieces are donations from alumni, former administrators and members of the larger Los Angeles community. A 2008 appraisal estimated the value was more than $12 million, according to a 2022 district document obtained by EdSource.

“LAUSD history is Los Angeles history,” said Cintia Romero, the archive and museum’s curator and archivist. “We have all the people here; we have all kinds of buildings; we have all kinds of architecture; we have all kinds of cultures.” 

It is rare for school districts to hold on to such artifacts, says Brenda Gunn, the president-elect of the Society of American Archivists.

“I don’t think it’s very common at all,” Gunn said. “I think what typically happens is that the school districts don’t really invest in any sort of preservation. It’s not often that a school district has an archivist, and if they do have any preservation efforts, it’s usually by a nonprofessional.” 

Treasures at school sites 

School officials also collect items unearthed at school sites during renovations — such as old fire alarms — as well as yearbooks and photographs that document LAUSD history. Los Angeles Unified says it maintains “professional standards for archival care and are intended to ensure that important pieces of the district’s history are maintained for future generations.” 

“School district records are like a continuous public diary of shifts in neighborhoods, how the school district has approached its curriculum, how did it manage desegregation or any big social and cultural events,” Gunn said. She added that some might also be interested in viewing them for something more personal, like understanding family genealogy. 

There’s little the LAUSD archive turns down. The main criteria is whether the art can serve in an educational capacity or as a teaching aide, Romero said. While LAUSD does sometimes loan pieces out to other institutions, it is “not in the business of buying or selling artwork.” And sometimes, she said, selling wouldn’t be in the “spirit of the donors,” some of whom were the original artists. 

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be valuable to be accepted. It can be a teaching aid,” Romero said. “So, everything kind of has value, really. Everything can be somewhere.”

And it is. 

The “X” on LAUSD’s treasure map sits in a warehouse at the school police headquarters in rows of boxes that house a large portion of the collection. That includes the district’s  collection donated by Venice High School’s historic Latin Museum, which operated from 1932 to 1997, and is now defunct.

In a small museum at the LAUSD headquarters on S. ​​Boundary Avenue, there is a display mimicking a late 19th-century classroom. 

In the “classroom” are wooden phonics teaching tools with scrolling letters, antique maps and silver-colored vessels once used during home economics classes. 

The classroom has a list of “Rules for Teachers 1872” that sits on the front desk: bring “a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session,” take “one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they attend church regularly.” 

Preservation at schools 

But it is among the modern-day classrooms with digital tablets and smart boards where the rest of the treasure lies:

Typically, in most school districts, items just end up sitting idly by for years, succumbing to what archivists call “benign neglect,” Gunn said.   

“There are all kinds of places that this archival material will end up,” Gunn said. “And staff are like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to throw this away, but it can’t be in my office, so I’m going to store it somewhere,’ and then it stays there until the next person.”

For Gunn, the hope is that school officials may take the extra step to preserve art, documents and history. Leaving something in a storage closet or in a box and walking away is not enough, she says.

“You’re not hurting anything. You’re certainly not throwing things away, but you’re not helping this; you’re not improving the situation of the records,” Gunn said. “But, what you hope is that someone down the road will see them, open that door and say, ‘Oh, these are valuable. And, if we can’t keep them here, then maybe there is another archive that will take them.’”

In the case of the LAUSD archive, there have been several thefts, including a painting at Dorsey High School. Romero said that while there aren’t many details of the painting, the president of the school’s alumni association has since found it, and traded $25,000 worth of posters and plans to leave it to LAUSD. 

Today, the district maintains that school security procedures, including key access, protect the pieces. 

Ensuring public access

While LAUSD students might enjoy little treasures displayed on their school walls and in hallway display cases, it’s more challenging for members of the public to view items in the collection. 

In the 1980s, a formal inventory of art was curated. And in 2004, the collection was digitized, Romero said.

So, since 2018, Romero and her small staff — made up of a volunteer and a small cohort of interns from Cal State Northridge and LAUSD’s Downtown Business Magnet school — continued to digitize items and add them to a public , which can be viewed for free. 

This process of digitizing the archive is largely made possible by donations and grants, though Romero’s position is funded through LAUSD’s general fund, according to the district. 

But curating the collection isn’t just about LAUSD’s or Los Angeles’s past. It’s also about the future. 

Romero and her team also keep tabs on ongoing renovation projects at school sites that could reveal new additions. 

“We have so many schools, and each school has something,” Romero said. “Every school has some kind of history.”

I see many students viewing artificial intelligence as humanlike simply because it can write essays, do complex math or answer questions. AI can mimic human behavior but lacks meaningful engagement with the world.

Nikkolas Smith is not surprised by the book bans and culture of fear dominating schools in his home state of Texas.

If anything, recent events make his work as a children’s book illustrator and self-described “artivist” more urgent.

“I’m gonna keep making books that will probably be on banned lists
 because all they do is tell the truth about history. And it’s just ridiculous that accurate history is trying to be suppressed, basically, by those in power who have benefited from racism for centuries,” said Smith, who collaborated with Nikole Hannah-Jones to illustrate The 1619 Project for children. 

Growing up in Houston, he was taught to celebrate the tales of Davey Crockett and the Alamo — “whitewashed” stories “always from one perspective:” glorifying those who owned and killed other human beings, he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Now, alongside the words of Hannah-Jones and children’s book author RenĂ©e Watson, Smith’s art flips the script to teach young readers the legacy of slavery rooted in humanity; a Black history rooted in joy. 

In Born on the Water, the to The 1619 Project, Smith’s paintings bring the cultures of West Africans to life, showing the pre-enslavement history often omitted from classrooms.

“One of the things that me and Nikole talk about is there’s so much rich history, and culture, and so much joy in these tribes and these people that were stolen from their land,” Smith told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “You really have to understand all of that to understand how heavy it was, and how tragic it was… We really just wanted to show that life.”

From his plant-filled Los Angeles home, Smith paired Hannah-Jones and Watson’s poetry with family traditions, beautiful hair, dances, imagery that evoked death and spirits. Using a digital , his illustrations began as monochrome shapes and skeletons in Photoshop, impressions of how he felt after reading and internalizing their verses. 

The book hit shelves last fall amid a wave of proposed state laws aimed at preventing students from learning a mythical “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts.” In , legislation attempted to ban the 1619 Project explicitly. So far, Florida has succeeded.  

While a vocal minority of lawmakers and parents believe school aged children are too young to grapple with just how violence against Black people was intrinsic to the nation’s founding, many for the content. Born on the Water topped bestseller lists as families headed into 2022, looking for ways to talk to children about the country they’ll inherit. 

Smith’s artistic approach seemed a natural fit. In digital paintings, he added layer after layer of color and symbols — clouds modeled after picked cotton, the shape of a person sinking underwater, or a green toy tied to a tree, the only sign of life left after colonizers stole a tribe — to convey anger and fear in ways young readers could feel without being traumatized by explicit violence.

Long-inspired by Nina Simone “,” he’d balanced trauma and life in children’s illustrations for years, painting Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain and others killed by police. 

His second book, , explored the internalized hatred young Black children develop from racism and microaggressions. 

Through , which he describes as “art as therapy”, he tries to help himself and viewers heal “the broken bones of society.” 

“For them to say, we have a book about the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, and all of these very heavy things that we as Black people in America, we think about it all the time 
 I felt like that’s one of the biggest broken bones in America,” he said.

“
Remember that these weren’t slaves that were taken, these were brilliant people, and they did some amazing things … They knew how to design and build cities, they built this country, and that’s why they were stolen, because they were brilliant and good at what they do. We just want to remind people of that, and also how much they fought and resisted and got their freedom back.”

“And [for] the young folks who are not Black, there’s no shame in anything we’re saying. We want people to grow up having an accurate understanding of what happened in this country. I feel like it’s really not until we address all of these things openly and honestly that we’re gonna really grow and move forward as a nation.”
—Nikkolas Smith

Smith blurred linear understandings of time by using symbols across generations, to help young readers understand that “[ancestors’] vision of the future, their wildest dreams are now embodied in us — [we’re] having to take that mantle and move forward.” 

And in faces, Smith balanced the world of feelings bound up in the Black experience: from shame, when the protagonist cannot make a family tree beyond three generations, to pride, after her grandmother recounts the rich history of tribes pre-enslavement. Her hair, in Bantu knots, and clothing give reference to past generations.

Ultimately, Smith hopes his work can help the next generation of Black youth have a sense of pride. Over the next few months, he’ll paint scenes of Ruby Bridges, the first young person to integrate a Southern school in 1960. And next year, he’ll collaborate with celebrated author Timeka Fryer Brown on a picture book about the Confederate flag. 

He expects both will end up on some banned lists.   

“All we can do is keep putting the truth out there,” Smith said, “and it’ll get into the right hands.”

All paintings are illustrated by Nikkolas Smith for Born on the Water, a publication of Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. 

As a University of Akron professor, Bolton watched her students dig for inspiration and purpose amid online classes and an isolated college experience.

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As head of the Lima Symphony Orchestra, Brown-Ellis watched 75 musicians adapt and find ways to make ends meet while the audience moved from the seats in front of them to their computers at home.

But what they didn’t see was a dimming of the need for arts in education and in the community navigating a world without public events.

“Arts are not just leisure activities, arts are fundamental parts of our society and our economic prosperity,” Brown-Ellis said.

Brown-Ellis and Bolton are two of the newest members of the Ohio Citizens for the Arts’ Board of Directors, with Brown-Ellis serving as president of the board. The OCA is an advocacy organization that lobbies the state General Assembly and Congress to support arts in the state.

Bolton, who teaches 20th and 21st Century American literature and specializes in African American literature, saw the impact of the arts in one particular student, who said coming back to in-person gave her a new purpose, and even used a painting to express her feelings about the readings in Bolton’s class.

“There’s so much exhaustion (from the pandemic),” Bolton said. “I don’t know when it clicks or when it happens, but I think art
has this way, no matter where we are, of finding us and pulling us in, and making us realize what matters.”

For some people, it’s the tradition of going to the Nutcracker Ballet, for others it’s learning about the Harlem Renaissance. But for many, the arts represent a return to normalcy, something that the state and federal governments need to realize helps employers attract workers and keep residents in Ohio.

“It’s a way to look to your left or your right and you’re connected with our communities and with our people,” Bolton said.

Brown-Ellis is the perfect example of that concept. Formerly an international financial attorney in a different state, she moved back to her hometown of Lima looking for a marketing job while waiting to take the Ohio bar.

When the Lima Symphony Orchestra took her in, she fell in love and left the legal work behind.

“We have the opportunity to make an impact here,” Brown-Ellis said. “Because it is a small town, there is so much opportunity and obligation to bring performing arts to the seven-county radius.”

The arts “were given a lifeline” with pandemic relief funds coming to the arts industry, which Brown-Ellis said still has one of the highest unemployment rates.

In November 2020, the state put $20 million in toward the arts, considered a temporary stop-gap.

That lifeline came after $74 billion in estimated monthly losses for “creative occupations”, according to a 2020 report by the Brookings Institution. The OCA released a report in 2018 saying creative occupations accounted for $41 billion in state economic activity, and 290,000 jobs per year.

This month, the arts industry got a total of $1,065,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, in the form of 45 grants. Three of those grants went to Ohio research facilities “to analyze the value and/or impact of the arts,” according to the NEA.

MetroHealth received $85,000 in a research grant, along with Case Western Reserve University, who received $75,000. Ohio State University received $30,000 in research grants in the arts.

The future of the Ohio economy is beginning to depend on the arts and humanities, according to those teaching the students going into the workforce. Bolton said she’s heard from people in the financial and insurance sectors who are looking to connect with humanities students.

Bolton argues the creativity and critical thinking that comes from arts education brings different voices to the table that can adapt as the state and country does.

“When you’re part of our country and you’re concerned about the well-being of your state, it behooves us to do what we can to take care of our people,” Bolton said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

“It’s bigger than just us,” she would say.

Because she could provide that safe place, fear, happiness, and relief showed up in artwork the students created for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, when they were asked to illustrate the “best” and “most challenging” parts of the year. The drawings conveyed two distinct messages: First, the kids loved their friends, teacher, and community, and had suffered during remote learning. Second, they saw the value in safety protocols even though they hated the masks.

In this video, the students talk to reporter Bekah McNeel about their paintings and their pandemic school year. 

• Read more: The Second Pandemic — A Children’s Mental Health Crisis