Teens Re-Imagining Art, Community & Environment

For over a decade, TRACE (Teens Re-Imagining Art, Community & Environment) has partnered with artists who are dedicated to social practice to work with teens throughout Chicago with the goal of using art to engage, inspire, and persist for positive change.

TRACE is a jobs-focused, teen leadership program run by the Chicago Park District’s Division of Culture, Arts and Nature. TRACE promotes civic engagement and strives to cultivate creative, environmental and community-based youth activists. Using the arts to engage, inspire and persist, TRACErs create, advocate and enact change for a better world. Learn more here.

2020 Visions

In the midst of a global pandemic and one of the most politically charged moments in recent US history, TRACE commissioned 18 teens over 6 summer weeks to produce art which resonates with the moment and within themselves.

In the Cut

During the spring of 2020, the artists of Alt_ took up residence in Austin Town Hall to work as teaching artists for the Chicago Park District’s TRACE (Teens Re-Imagining Art, Community & Environment) program.