Mapping Myself

A Collaborative Public Art Project (San Francisco, 1999)

“Mapping Myself” was a twelve-week, community-engaged public art project that brought together six middle school students from Horace Mann Middle School with artists John Jota Leaños, Mónica Praba Pilar, and Marisa Vitiello. Rooted in socially conscious art pedagogy and participatory methods, the project centered the voices of youth whose lives are often shaped—and constrained—by structural disenfranchisement, yet seldom represented on their own terms in public culture.

Each student was given a 35mm camera and invited to document intimate, personal geographies—photographing family members, peers, housing environments, neighborhood streetscapes, and school spaces. These images formed the core of a powerful visual mapping process, one in which identity was rendered not as a static label, but as an evolving interplay of relationships, place, and perspective.

The resulting multi-layered self-portraits paired photographs with written reflections, expressing the inner and outer landscapes of urban adolescence. Each 4x6-foot image offered an intricate map of lived experience, charting not just where these youth come from—but how they see, survive, and shape their world.

Installed across multiple public venues in San Francisco, these large-scale portraits disrupted conventional narratives about Latinx and working-class urban youth. The project challenged dominant media representations that too often portray such communities through deficit-based frames of violence, failure, or pathology. Instead, "Mapping Myself" created an intervention—an opportunity for youth to claim public space, and to narrate their own complexity with dignity, authorship, and nuance.

This project was part of the Mexican Museum’s After-School Art Program, underscoring the museum’s investment in youth empowerment, cultural education, and public art as a tool for both self-determination and civic transformation.