Growing up in Nicaragua in the 1960s, San Francisco Bay Area resident Blanca Lorena Perez detonated what she called “ash bombs” in her aunt’s garden. Beneath a tall mango tree, she and her cousins would drop a heavy rock onto one end of their wooden seesaw, causing a can of ashes balanced on the opposite end to jump, spewing the powdery residue they culled from fallen leaves burned to use as fertilizer.
Perez’s aunt was none too pleased to discover the kids’ wasteful, messy game, but Perez laughs as she points to a scene of the playful pastime she’s painted in watercolor, the palette dominated by vibrant greens.
“These are happy, nostalgic memories,” she said. She’s brought them back to visual life with help from an unlikely source, artificial intelligence.
Like a number of students in a San Francisco art class for older women who immigrated to the Bay Area from Latin America, Perez doesn’t have many photos of her early life — she had to limit the possessions she brought when she fled Nicaragua with her four young children in 1979 aboard a Red Cross plane. “We left because of one of the worst wars that can exist, a civil war which pits you against your own people, against friends, cousins, and in some cases, your own brothers,” Perez said.
That many women in the weekly class lack physical mementos of their past gave art teacher Hugh Leeman a novel idea: Use AI to help students recreate photographs they’d left behind, or never had in the first place.
The amateur artists recount memories, and Leeman prompts an AI text-to-image tool such as Midjourney or Open AI’s Dall-e to create a visual template of the recollections they can reference as they draw their own versions. With the algorithmically generated images displayed on a large screen at the front of the classroom (and on a Zoom shared screen for those attending remotely), the women follow Leeman’s guided instructions, relayed in Spanish, as they recreate the contours in pencil and include their own flourishes. Later, they’ll add watercolor or acrylic paint.
“They walk away with a handmade artwork that reflects a lived experience,” Leeman said. Based on that artwork, Leeman, an artist and art lecturer at Duke University, Colorado State University and Johns Hopkins University, facilitates an oral history interview with his students. He then gives them digital copies of the recorded interviews and the recreated “photographs” they can share with family back home, some of whom they have only met over the phone or video chat.
From Leeman’s lessons in traditional narrative art making, the women, most in their seventies, learn about fundamentals such as composition, scale and proportion. And they learn, at least in basic terms, about AI, a technology that’s dividing the art world, with some artists excited about its potential to steer their work in new directions and others concerned it could steal their work and livelihoods, or alter the very nature of creativity.
But on a recent sunny Saturday in a classroom less than half a mile from the headquarters of OpenAI, a start-up at the epicenter of the fraught debate over AI and art, that conversation couldn’t feel further away. The room becomes quiet as engrossed students hunch over sheets of paper, bags of art supplies next to them, keeping their cultural legacy alive.
“When I draw, I feel relaxed and I forget all the bad things I have in my life,” said Bonnie Perez, 77 and no relation to Blanca Lorena Perez. She left El Salvador in 1978 with her husband and two young children to join her brothers in the U.S. after her mom died. She points to her painting of Cojutepeque, where she recalls a contented childhood climbing trees and playing with dogs. The artwork shows a school, brightly colored houses and the winding path visitors climb during an annual religious pilgrimage to a grotto displaying an image of Mary, mother of Jesus.
She’s not the only one who painted her hometown. Leeman has students simultaneously depict each other’s life stories, in addition to their own. In doing so, they often discover powerful unifying threads that evoke history, tradition and family bonds.
“It’s good,” Bonnie Perez said. “Every person uses their imagination a little bit differently.”
On this September morning, a large display at a Mission District community center called MNC Inspiring Success flashes an AI-generated image of a girl ladeling a drink for an older woman. The pair stands in a cemetery surrounded by orange and yellow marigolds.
On closer inspection, AI’s uneven imprint becomes apparent in the extra arm with a surfeit of fingers that juts from the older woman’s side. Despite the AI glitches, there’s no mistaking Ana Miranda’s childhood memory. Every November around “Dia de los Difuntos,” the Salvadoran name for Day of the Dead, Miranda’s mother sent her to local cemeteries to sell cevada, a drink made of malted barley, sugar and lemon, to families gathered to clean graves, lay flowers and celebrate their dearly departed.
Miranda’s mom made the beverage at home, and Miranda carried it to the cemetery in an olla, or pot, perched atop her head. Drawing the scene, said Miranda, now 72, “I feel like I come back to when I was younger and I say, ‘Well, this is the way that I can help my mother.”
Powerful Stories Preserved
Miranda’s single mom supported her four children by making traditional Salvadoran turkey sandwiches called panes con pavo for a local restaurant. At 18, Miranda came to the U.S. alone to earn money she could send back home. She’s eager to tell her story, all of it, from the triumphs to the traumas. She recalls the fear she felt at her first job in this country when the grandfather of the child she cared for as a live-in nanny tried to enter her room in the middle of the night and she rushed to push a sofa up against the door.
“The next day, you know where I slept? Under the bed in the girl’s room,” she said. “Nobody saw me because the covers go down to the floor. I slept there every night. I locked the door.”
Miranda, and many other students in Leeman’s class, had no prior art training, though it’s hard to tell looking at their meticulous lines and skillful, striking use of color. As relative beginners, they say the AI-generated images provide a valuable visual roadmap for constructing their paintings’ scaffolding.
“What’s fascinating to me about working with AI is I can draw from the shapes that AI gives,” said a student in a similar class for LGBTQ+ seniors who asked that his name not be used.
Leeman teaches both classes through Art With Elders, a program that engages older adults and those living with disabilities in remote and in-person fine arts classes, then publicly exhibits their work. The program originated in 1991, and AI has given it a 21st century spin. Leeman, whose work typically focuses on social issues, had his AI aha moment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he started tinkering with newly released text-to-image tools like Midjourney and Open AI’s Dall-e.
“I started to be like, ‘Wow, this is where you can pull people’s very specific experiences into a tangible reality and use that as the visual inspiration for an artwork,” he said.
The idea emboldened him in his determination to lead lessons that tapped emotions and personal narratives rather than focusing on objects, like some classes for beginners do. Now, with AI, he’d found a way to make those narratives visually accessible.
“I don’t think too many people are sitting around thinking ‘I really want to engage with the profundity of creativity so I can draw apples for the rest of my life,’” Leeman said. “It’s about wanting to record things that allow them to connect with others and create things that speak in their absence.”
