Multilingual Learners
NYC DOE M/WBE-approved vendor • Projects in NYC public schools, Alaska, and Ghana
The Painted Cloud makes in-depth, multimodal arts projects co-authored by the community - murals, songs, music videos, prints, and animations. We work with young artists and their families in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. The work starts in the languages spoken at home. We have worked in Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Patois, German, Greek, Georgian, Dagbani, Tlingit, and Yup'ik.
Based in Brooklyn, The Painted Cloud partners each year with different NYC public schools. The Painted Cloud also travels for projects with other communities - work in Alaska and Ghana is featured on this page.
Some partner schools have little to no standalone art instruction, and the project becomes a way to build creative practice into the school day. Others have established arts programs, and the project extends what is already there into place-based content, environmental themes, social-emotional learning, and multilingual curriculum development.
Each project starts with the community's words, centered on goals aligned with the partner school or entity. Community words in a project are gathered on a Family Questionnaire translated into the languages families speak at home, in interviews with friends, family, and neighbors, or in residency conversations that last weeks. These words become the material for the work - the lyrics, the painted colors, and the data behind the graphs.
The work treats multilingualism as an asset, and reciprocal learning is built into every project - young artists, families, teachers, and The Painted Cloud team learning and teaching together. The Painted Cloud brings production tools, materials, and methods, integrating teachers' core curriculum into lesson plans the school can use after the residency ends.
Translanguaging runs through the work: songs that move between languages in the same breath, murals showing the same word in multiple scripts, and music videos where multilingual learners take the lead. Each project is co-authored with the school and the community, unique to that place and that moment, and work the school can be proud to share.
Lincoln Center and NYU Metro Center invited The Painted Cloud to join the inaugural Artful Growth cohort for the 2025-2026 academic year - one of ten arts education organizations developing inclusive practices for multilingual learners.
We invite you to click on any project - to listen to the songs, see the murals and visual arts projects, watch the videos, and meet the young artists and families who have made work we find hopeful in this wild time on earth.
