Supporters of urban youth making art and letting their creative expression go wild will want to check out the 14th Annual Urban Youth Arts Festival Fundraiser, at El Rio, on March 31st. Hosted by Precita Eyes, all proceeds go towards this year’s Urban Youth Arts Festival, an annual event for youth and families that features live music, performances, food, and art galore. The fundraiser will include music by local musicians, live painting by Precita Eyes muralists, and artwork by local Bay Area artists. Oh yeah, and lots of free barbecue! Don’t miss it! For more information, go here.

Thanks to everyone who came out to our Claim the Block reading at MoAD, featuring students from Downtown High School and Ida B. Wells High School. It was great to see so much support from the WritersCorps fam! Here are some photos from the event. Many thanks to Michele Kraus for taking them.

Mark your calendars for March 11, because our next Claim the Block event is right around the corner! This time, WritersCorps teachers and students from Hilltop School, Mission High School, and the San Francisco Main Library will be reading their work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Admission is free and also includes free entrance to CJM’s galleries, so before heading over to the event, be sure to check out their newest exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” a poignant show based on the collective artwork and book, Notre Combat (Our Struggle, in English), based on French painter/photographer Linda Ellia’s response to Hitler’s autobiography.

A page from "Notre Combat," Linda Ellia

The exhibition includes 600 “altered” pages from the book—Ellia personally altered the book by painting, drawing, sculpting, and collaging directly onto the pages. She then invited hundreds of people from around the world to do the same. The exhibition brings together a remarkable variety of artistic styles and powerful voices—from poets to journalists to students to survivors of the Holocaust. For more information on this and other exhibitions at the Contemporary Jewish museum, go here. And for more information on Claim the Block events, go here.

For an exciting afternoon of poetry and performance for a great cause, be sure to check out AYIBOBO! AMEN FOR HAITI this Sunday at the Glide Memorial Church. It’s a free presentation of poetry and music, brought to us by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, and Revolutionary Poets Brigade. Former San Francisco Poet Laureates Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, devorah major, and Janice Mirkitani join forces with a host of other poets, including Jorge Argueta, Agneta Falk, Ishmael Reed, Michael Warr, and others. All donations will be given directly to Doctors without Borders. For more information, go here.

If you’re not afraid to brave the rain tonight, check out Cultural Encounters tonight at the de Young. This new series takes place every Friday night, and the museum stays open until 8:45 pm to present a plethora of arts-related events, ranging from live music to poetry to films to tours and lectures. Admission to the event gets you into the de Young’s galleries free of charge. Tonight’s performance includes live music by VidyA, printmaking demonstrations by Txutxo Perez, and a closing reception for artist Ann Weber, a sculptor who makes whimsical, curiously shaped towers out of a mundane medium: cardboard. For more information on tonight’s event and upcoming Cultural Encounters programs, go here.

Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo (May 7 Cultural Encounters event)