UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Marissa Gutiérrez-Vicario, founder and executive director of Art and Resistance Through Education (ARTE), has been named the 2024 recipient of the Linda Stein Upstander Award administered by Penn State University Libraries.
The Linda Stein Upstander Award honoring Joyce and Diane Froot annually supports social justice activists from around the world whose artistic or scholarly work promotes upstander activities. An online legacy statement about the Linda Stein Upstander Award describes Joyce Froot and Linda Stein’s friendship spanning nearly five decades and Froot’s active collection of Stein’s artwork.
Gutiérrez-Vicario also is an artist-in-residence at the Initiative for a Just Society at the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University, a doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College in the Art and Art Education program and a lecturer at the City College of New York. A self-described “committed human rights and peace-building activist, artist, educator and advocate for youth,” Gutiérrez-Vicario wrote that she launched ARTE in 2013 “to help youth amplify their voices and organize for human rights change in their communities through visual arts.”
To pursue her project, “Finding Human Rights Knowledge in Art: Empowering Youth of Color to Become Upstanders,” Gutiérrez-Vicario will receive $1,500 plus a $2,000 travel grant and will have full access to Penn State’s Linda Stein Art Education Collection in the University Libraries’ Eberly Family Special Collections and Stein’s papers at Smith College Libraries’ Special Collections, as well as Stein’s websites haveartwilltravel.org and lindastein.com. Gutiérrez-Vicario’s resulting work will be developed for publication and archived in ScholarSphere, Penn State’s online institutional repository managed by the University Libraries.
Gutiérrez-Vicario wrote that her project will focus on analyzing “not only Stein’s work in relation to human rights knowledge but how such knowledge is refined in her artwork over a period of time and can be taught through student-centered engagement with her art.” Through her research she seeks “to understand how changes in human rights knowledge form over time through creating art as a generative visual vocabulary toward empowering those who have experienced human rights violations.” She also said she hopes her research will inspire a workshop she will create to teach human rights information to support upstander behavior in its participants.
Gutiérrez-Vicario will be honored and offer a presentation about her research project, titled “Finding Human Rights Knowledge in Art: Empowering Youth of Color to Become Upstanders,” at 2:30 p.m. on March 27, 2025, in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, on Penn State’s University Park campus, and also via Zoom. Following the presentation, a pop-up event held through 5 p.m. will include graduate students presenting their selections from Linda Stein’s archives.
Justice activists from around the world whose artistic or scholarly work promotes upstander activities are encouraged to apply for the Linda Stein Upstander Award. Applicants are expected to have specific plans to research archival materials from the Linda Stein Art Education Collection.
Interested applicants may visit the online application site for more information. The annual application deadline for the 2025 award is 11:59 p.m. on Feb. 1.