The most important component of any creative community may well be its ability to lift up and encourage the next generation of artists, performers, and creative voices, imparting to young minds the fulfillment and fun of creating as well as the importance of connection and of community itself.
And for the past decade, that’s been the mission of arts-and-sustainability-focused education center SixTwelve.
Located in the equally arts-focused Paseo District of Oklahoma City, SixTwelve is designed as a space to foster a love of arts and community trough afterschool programs and workshops for young children, but also to help drive the scene for creative adults through residencies and showcases and even recently expanded creative partnerships as far away as Georgia and California.
As founder and director Amy Young looks back on the past decade of SixTwelve and prepares to celebrate the beginning of the school’s next decade with a blowout concert and fundraiser this month at the Tower Theatre, she says that she’s still surprised at just how successful her little school has been for the community.
Amy Young: I never really saw it going as big as it is now, and it may still be small potatoes to some people, but to me, it feels like a huge accomplishment just to be at this place.
Brett Fieldcamp: When they first opened their doors in 2015, SixTwelve was mainly focused on visual and tactile arts education for young children through painting, gardening, cooking, and more, anything to help activate the students’ creativities and curiosities, and anything to encourage collaboration, an element that they also showcased through their artist residencies.
For Young, it was not only a way to bolster and support the arts community of OKC, but ialso a stab at realizing her own dream of the kind of school she’d always wanted to see after years as a public schoolteacher.
Amy Young: I taught elementary school music for eight years, and I knew from that experience that I wanted to open my own school, and I just kept notes on everything I would do differently.
Everything that I've done, really, in my professional career, has led to this
Brett Fieldcamp: But even as fulfilling as these last ten years have been for Young, she admits that they haven’t been easy.
In addition to the well-known complexities of operating a non-profit and of working with children, the five-year mark for SixTwelve came alongside the COVID pandemic of 2020.
Classes were cancelled, residencies were shelved, and Young even eventually sold her own house and moved into the school in order to ensure that it could stay open.
When she was finally able to reopen the following year, she knew that it was the right time to take stock of what SixTwelve had been and to make some big decisions about what it could become.
That meant unfortunately dropping the award-winning preschool classes they’d always offered and moving the educational focus of the afterschool classes and artist residencies more fully toward Young’s first and deepest love: music.
Amy Young: To shift from focusing on the visual arts to musical arts was its own identity shift as well, because everything I was seeing was saying “life is short, you should do what you love,” and I really, really love the musicians in this city.
I feel so lucky to know a lot of them, to support a lot of them in whatever way I can, and to get to work with them.
Brett Fieldcamp: That meant reaching out to build an all new staff and stable of music educators from the OKC music scene to work with the school’s young students, and also fully recalibrating their artist residency program toward music by focusing on songwriting retreats and developing partnerships for recording opportunities and performance support.
Now five years on from that big shift, the reach of SixTwelve’s musical opportunities has spread across the entire country.
Amy Young: We just expanded our application for our music residency summer program to include people from LA and Savannah, and they can come in, and we can send Oklahoma City musicians out.
And that's something I've been working towards for, like, the last five years, building things back up financially to where we could even afford it.
Brett Fieldcamp: That process of rebuilding over these past five years has paid off beyond even Young’s own expectations with higher-than-ever enrollment numbers and even a monthly concert series in The Paseo showcasing local artists.
Now she and her team are gearing up for a massive celebration of SixTwelve’s first full decade with a concert and party event at the Tower Theatre featuring psych-rock breakouts Broncho on February 22nd that’s set to harken back to the Mardi Gras theme of the school’s very first fundraising events all those years ago.
To Young, there’s really no secret to that success. All it takes is the same focus, confidence, and creative curiosity that she works to instill in the children and future artists that she feels lucky to call her students.
Amy Young: To me, it was important to do this to celebrate 10 years because we don't know what even the next year is going to bring.
So I just give gratitude every day - even when it's hard - that I get to work with kids, I get to work with artists, I get to work with our staff and our board.
I just feel so lucky.
Brett Fieldcamp: For more information about SixTwelve, including afterschool programs or artist residency opportunities, visit sixtwelve.org, and for tickets to their 10th anniversary concert and fundraising event featuring Broncho and the King Cabbage Brass Band, visit towertheatreokc.com.
