Green Arts at PS 20
Seed to harvest, garden to art studio. Hands-on environmental and arts education for all PS 20 students, every year since 2013
Green Arts is 100% funded by the PS 20 PTA.
There is no district or city budget for this program. Every seed, tool, art supply, and instructor hour is paid by families like yours.
What is Green Arts?
Where the garden and the art studio meet the classroom.
Green Arts is an interdisciplinary, hands-on program — a collaboration between classroom teachers and the PS 20 Arts and PS 20 Farms programs. What children do outside in the garden and inside the art studio informs and complements their work in the classroom.
So while students are digging in the dirt and expressing themselves through visual art, they're also building on their IB Units of Inquiry — broadening how they learn, make, and understand the world around them.
What students do
Three ways children grow
In the Garden
From seed to harvest: planting, tending, and tasting herbs, mixed greens, tomatoes, squash and more — plus composting, food education, nutrition, and even beekeeping.
In the Art Studio
Visual-arts instruction through Studio in a School, where students manipulate real materials and production processes — turning what they observe in the garden into art.
In the Community
Our learning gardens now sit on Clermont Avenue by the Albert Parham playground (courtesy of NYC Parks) — more visible and open to neighbors, creating flourishing shared green space.
Meet the instructor
A decade of digging in with our students
Mr. Jonathan Blumberg
Gardening Instructor · @jblumberg1
A lifelong gardener, Mr. Blumberg has taught at PS 20 for over a decade. He has worked at schools across Brooklyn, taught at the New York and Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and runs small urban farms for Slow Food NYC in East New York.
He guides students through the full lifecycle of vegetables — seed to harvest to the kitchen — alongside plant science, ecology, composting, and beekeeping, all tied to each grade's curriculum.
Collaboration · Hedgework @ PS 20
Making the invisible visible.
At our Clermont Avenue gardens, Hedgework is a living installation that pairs native plants with environmental sensing — a natural storyteller that uses real-time data to communicate about the health of its microbiome, woven right into our IB curriculum.
Help Green Arts keep growing.
Because this program lives entirely on PTA support, your gift goes straight into the soil. It finances seeds, tools, art supplies, and the instructors who make it all happen for the entire school.
Questions? Email: greenarts@ps20.org