About – Class Set

Class Set brings art from the gallery to classroom walls, commissioning contemporary artists to celebrate social justice and creative thinking. Since 2017, artist Jessalyn Aaland has paired artists with the voices of authors and activists to provide K-12 teachers with free Risograph prints for their classrooms. Over 23,000 prints have been distributed to classrooms worldwide. Through the accompanying curriculum guide, students take inspiration from the posters to create their own, stepping into the role of artist and visionary. The project builds community through accessible art-making anyone can engage in.

As artist-curator, Aaland selects artists whose work wouldn’t typically appear in a political or social justice poster context—introducing students to contemporary aesthetics they may not have encountered before, and which may even surprise them. She looks for artists with a background in print design or text-based work, often graphic or colorful in style, sometimes incorporating pattern or illustration—visual languages more likely to hold a young audience’s interest. The quotes she curates are often from “regular people who decided to do something” (as she puts it), chosen to convey the values within the public schools where she spent nine years as an educator.

The seeds of Class Set were sown when Aaland was teaching at a San Francisco public high school. Her classroom had black mold and mice, a broken clock and, beside it, a working one she’d bought herself. Like many teachers working within a liberation framework, she wanted the walls to reflect the social justice values she was trying to teach.

During a summer residency in 2013, she had access to a Risograph duplicator. She set about hand-inking a set of quotes from Gloria Anzaldúa and Ursula K. Le Guin and printed them in two colors. She gave the prints to other teachers; students used them as something to land on when they spaced out in class.

Her colleagues all wanted copies, and they soon plastered walls all over the school. After Aaland left teaching, she wondered how she could reprise the project with other artists, to provide aesthetic variety and introduce students to the work of contemporary artists.

With support from Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure program, Aaland commissioned ten Bay Area artists in 2017 to design the prints that became Volume 1. The grant allowed Aaland to distribute posters to teachers for free. She planned to give them out to teachers throughout the Bay Area. As word spread about the project, she sent them to teachers all over the country: Seattle, Salt Lake City, Austin, Chicago, Toledo, New York City, Honolulu. Eventually, they traveled the world: Nunavut, Canada (near the Arctic Circle); Stockholm; Indonesia; and New Taipei City, Taiwan.

Volume 2 debuted in 2019 and expanded the artists Aaland collaborated with beyond the Bay Area. The demand for Volume 1 led to a tripling in edition size: from 225 to 750 copies of each print.

Later in 2019, Aaland was selected by the San Francisco Arts Commission for its Art on Market Street program. She created Volume 3 for the project, using quotes focused on activism. Another ten artists were commissioned (including international ones), and their poster designs were installed as large-format prints in bus shelters along Market Street. The accompanying curriculum guide included activities like roleplaying protest scenarios and a walking tour of Market Street protest history for Bay Area teachers.

With Volume 4 in 2020, Class Set expanded to Portland, Oregon as a collaboration with artist and educator Anne Greenwood Rioseco. Portland-based 3rd grade teacher Rodrigo Aguirre helped adapt the curriculum for younger students. A launch party was held at c3 initiative (now Stelo Arts) in February 2020 where teachers could pick up their poster sets and meet some of the artists, with a reading by quote author Kim Stafford and a DJ set by artist Dylan Muldrew, performing as ZOO.

Aaland and Greenwood Rioseco also worked with fifth-graders at KSMoCA to help them design their own posters, which Aaland Risograph-printed back in her Bay Area studio just as the pandemic began. The final prints were distributed to students’ homes by their teacher after the school went into lockdown.

Since the project’s inception, Aaland has led workshops for teachers and youth at institutions including Mission High School (through Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Oxbow School, Teachers for Social Justice, Hamlin School, and the San Francisco Public Library.

As Laura B. Winnick, a 10th and 12th grade English teacher at Urban Assembly Maker Academy in New York City, put it: “I have tried for so long to find radical posters to showcase marginalized voices and show that my stance as an educator is that the personal is political. Class Set achieves this; gets students in dialogue with one another; beautifies my classroom space!”

Across four volumes of 40 prints, Class Set has grown with support from Southern Exposure, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, Oakland Stock, and individual donors.

Class Set has been featured in Juxtapoz and KQED, and exhibited at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York, the Rosenberg Library at City College of San Francisco, Dream Farm Commons in Oakland, and the Koret Education Center at SFMOMA. It is held in the collections of Meta Open Arts, SFMOMA’s Library and Archives, and The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Class Set has been distributed in part through Southern Exposure in San Francisco and Cherry Sprout Market, Little Otsu, and Passages Bookshop in Portland.

Free teacher editions are no longer available, but some prints are available for purchase at currenteditions.biz.

Class Set brings art from the gallery to classroom walls, commissioning contemporary artists to celebrate social justice and creative thinking. Since 2017, artist Jessalyn Aaland has paired artists with the voices of authors and activists to provide K-12 teachers with free Risograph prints for their classrooms. Over 23,000 prints have been distributed to classrooms worldwide. Through the accompanying curriculum guide, students take inspiration from the posters to create their own, stepping into the role of artist and visionary. The project builds community through accessible art-making anyone can engage in.

As artist-curator, Aaland selects artists whose work wouldn’t typically appear in a political or social justice poster context—introducing students to contemporary aesthetics they may not have encountered before, and which may even surprise them. She looks for artists with a background in print design or text-based work, often graphic or colorful in style, sometimes incorporating pattern or illustration—visual languages more likely to hold a young audience’s interest. The quotes she curates are often from “regular people who decided to do something” (as she puts it), chosen to convey the values within the public schools where she spent nine years as an educator.

The seeds of Class set were sown when Aaland was teaching at a San Francisco public high school. Her classroom had black mold and mice, a broken clock and, beside it, a working one she’d bought herself. Like many teachers working within a liberation framework, she wanted the walls to reflect the social justice values she was trying to teach.