Some days Gael Navarro dreams about becoming a professional baseball player.
Other days, the seventh grader at Robins K-8 School considers drawing and painting for a living.
As he was immersed in Frida Kahlo’s artwork, life history and desert plants at the Tucson Botanical Gardens Thursday morning, it was the latter.
“She was a good artist and this is showing me how to be an artist. People can do that,” Navarro said. “She’s also a regular person. What I also learned about her that I thought was a little bit weird is that she actually didn’t care whether she had a unibrow or a mustache!”
Exposing students to Kahlo’s self-portraits and life experience in México, while also giving a humanities lesson is just part of what Act One does. The nonprofit helps Title I schools expose students to the arts via field trips to museums, theater, concerts and more.
Navarro was one of about 50 Tucson-area middle- and high-school students on a field trip to the Frida’s Garden exhibit at the Botanical Gardens on Thursday morning. The excursion was one of more than 200 this school year provided by Act One.
Started in 2011, Act One aims to help Title I schools — those with at least 40% low-income students — mostly in the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas, take field trips and provide key transportation if a school district cannot afford it. In 2013, Act One began teaming with arts organizations to provide Culture Passes in about 200 libraries across Arizona. In 2021, the group expanded to include a virtual reality field trip program as a way to reach rural students with arts and cultural experiences.
How and why Act One works in their own words:
“I was walking with one group from (Palo Verde) high school — a group of girls from Uganda — and we were over in the kitchen garden and the girls said they recognized some of the plants because they used them in Africa. They pulled apart the plant for fiber or made it into a drink for older people. And as they were telling me all this, I was just amazed they had this much knowledge about a plant I had never seen before. They got emotional, saying ‘I really miss my homeland and this makes me feel very connected to it.’ That is the most special part of our job: We get experiences like that. We are so lucky that we get to do that.” — Beth Maloney, Act One executive director, 20-year school teacher
“Mostly doing arts, that’s what I like to do. I sketch things out or just look at an image and I can put it in memories in my brain. Math is my favorite subject in school and right now we are doing mixed fractions, but today I get to come here on this field trip. Last year, we went to the U of A and we’ve been looking forward to this since then.”
— Gael Navarro, Robins K-8 seventh grader, catcher and right fielder for the Tucson Bandidos Baseball Club
“The most popular trips by volume are to The Nutcracker (ballet) and the Tetra String Quartet. … We filled the Orpheum Theater (in Phoenix), hosted 850 students. And at the end of the concert, without prompting, they played ‘Golden’ (from KPop Demon Hunters). And all 800 students were singing at the top of their lungs — the chorus, the bridges, the breakdown — there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was moving and powerful and it echoes into their lives. We don’t know if it’s 10 or 20 years from now. We don’t know how it’s going to impact them.” — Emanuel Class, Act One field trip manager
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