Jeremy Del Rio (CAS ’95, LAW ’99) Brings Art Back to New York City’s Students and Spaces

November 15, 2024

with contributions from Yuleisdy Guerrero (CAS ’26)

Since its founding, Thrive Collective has created over 600 murals in NYC, including “A Better Tomorrow” in the Bronx, “Peace and Unity” in Staten Island, “Be Your Own Superhero” in Brooklyn, and “We are OP,” a mural created in collaboration with NYU’s Opportunity Project and its students. The nonprofit organization connects artists and youth workers with local schools with a mission to “bring art back” to some of the city’s most underserved communities. Beginning with New York City schools, Thrive has expanded to schools in cities including Dallas, Texas; San Diego and Oakland California; and Baltimore, Maryland. 

“Our fundamental approach to this work is that every community is filled with masterpiece lives, and our job is not to create masterpieces in neighborhoods, but rather to celebrate and accelerate the beauty that already exists,” says Del Rio. Read on to discover how his unexpected journey from litigation law to arts advocate has empowered young people to reimagine their communities and themselves.

What motivated you to start Thrive Collective? What are some of the goals and initiatives you’re particularly passionate about?

This spring marked 10 years since the City of New York confessed to a terrible, self-inflicted injustice; in 2014, New York sentenced more than 250,000 students to an artless education everyday. At the time, 419 public schools in low income neighborhoods lacked a music or arts teacher of any kind. The very same communities that had invented hip hop in the 1970s were denied access to even the most basic arts education in the 2010s. These schools were surrounded by creatives of every kind. Throw a rock from any schoolyard, and you’ll likely find a singer, dancer, filmmaker, graphic designer, or other artist. I thought, why not build a bridge for neighborhood artists to bring art back to neighborhood schools? 

In the last ten years, we have served 35,000 students in 250 schools, and worked in Texas, California, Maryland, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Together with 200 artists and 3,500 volunteers from 120 partner organizations, our students have produced more than 600 murals totaling 200,000 square feet of public art, over 45 original songs and music videos, and more than 100 student films. The City of New York has become our largest funder, as we help eradicate artless education and bring art back to every student and school. 

You studied history at NYU CAS and then earned your JD at NYU Law; what brought you to NYU? 

I’m a New Yorker and NYU was always part of the landscape that I grew up in. My uncle, when I was growing up, was a working actor, and he lived in a studio apartment on Greene Street. Anytime I’d visit him, I was on the campus essentially and it always resonated. I am a New Yorker through and through and love Manhattan: the energy, the people, and the diversity. 

Being that Thrive was founded in New York and built with the intention of New York, tell us about how it’s expanded beyond New York? 

I’ve had the pleasure of connecting with people in youth development in different cities around the country. In those networking and shared learning spaces, I’ve built great relationships. For many years, people in other cities have inquired about what we do in New York public schools and how they could replicate some of that work in their communities. For a long time, we didn’t have the infrastructure or capacity to expand, so we adopted an open-source mentality to share what we learned. Heading into 2020, we felt like we’d matured as an organization enough to share more proactively. We had a strategic planning retreat in January 2020, but six weeks later the world shut down. We put the planning on the back burner as we adapted Thrive's work in schools for online spaces. As the city reopened, we pulled that planning document off the shelf, applied for grants, and received them to do a national replication pilot. We launched that in 2021, identifying three cities where we had strong social networks, and trusted people to serve as city coordinators. That’s how we ended up in Dallas, San Diego, and Oakland.

Can you share more about how Thrive’s work has evolved and accelerated?

In the spring of 2014, we did four murals. From spring 2014 until 2022, we did 300 murals. From fall 2022 until August 2024, we more than doubled again. It took us only 18 months to do our second 300 murals. Some of the growth was due to expansion into other cities, but over 600 murals have been created here in the five boroughs. It’s incredibly gratifying to see a physical manifestation of the transformation we talk about in such an idealistic, abstract way. When you’re doing youth development work, you’re inspiring kids to believe they can change their future and impact their present reality. And when the deliverables are creative, you’re not just working with metaphors or ideals; they actually see the result of their work.

Public art is transformational on so many levels because it’s enduring. Kids can come back for years and see the impact they've made. It’s a physical demonstration of the power to change a community. It’s been incredible to see the effect on not only the young people who participated, but also on their families, neighbors, and the teachers and administrators in their schools. Successive generations of students who weren’t there when the murals were painted still benefit from the long-term impact of that work. We've had over 35,000 students participate in our murals program alone, and that doesn’t even include all the other art programs we run.

What advice would you give to the NYU Class of 2024?

Live a great story. NYU equips us with relationships,skills, and knowledge that can be utilized in a lot of different ways. But when we utilize it in a way that starts with the premise that the most interesting story is the one we live—not the one we spectate, not the one we subscribe to, not the one that we watch in a movie theater or play on a video game—it makes life beautiful.

NYU sets us up for success when we take the relationships, the characters that we’re introduced to, and combine it with the practical skills. The purpose of our life, the things that get us up in the morning, that we’re passionate about, that stimulate our curiosity and activate our imagination—when that becomes the focus, the lives that we live are gratifying for us. They’re also a blessing for those around us and that beauty that we pursue makes everybody else’s life a little more special as well as our own. This allows us to ask, ‘How can I help?’ when we see somebody in need and ‘Why did I come across that person at this moment? Is there something that I can offer?’ It enables us to empathize. It enables us to demonstrate kindness. It enables us to see beyond the commotion of our lives. It has a deeper purpose and meaning. 

Do you have a favorite NYU memory that you’d like to share?

Prior to NYU, I never had an art class. At the end of my freshman year at NYU, I had the chance to travel with a group of students to Italy. My uncle, who lived on Greene Street, took me to the Met before I left, because he said, ‘I’m not letting you get on a plane to go to Italy when you’ve never been to an art museum.’ He and his partner curated a tour of the Met’s best pieces. About a week later, I was in Venice with a group of students, immersed in art for 10 days. I went from never having seen an art museum to exploring Italy’s art and cathedrals, and it was mind-blowing. I wasn’t thinking about art at the time; I was a pre-law, politics, and economics student. But the exposure completely awakened me to the power of art, and I ended up taking my first art class at NYU as a senior, which was painting and sculpture. Every Friday, we’d spend an hour in a lecture hall and then hop on a train to go to a museum for another two hours. This experience started my freshman year and bookended my undergraduate career. I wasn’t an art student, and I didn’t have the skill to produce the kind of work Thrive is known for. But those experiences equipped me for what I'm doing now. Even though I wasn’t practicing art, those museum visits and lectures deeply influenced me and prepared me for this stage in my life.

Growing up in New York, I was surrounded by street art and graffiti. My generation was around when graffiti and subway art were being pioneered. But at the time, it was just background noise to me—it didn’t captivate me. It was just part of the cultural environment I grew up in. At NYU, I started to see it differently. I realized it wasn’t just background noise; art has impacted the world for centuries. It’s one of the main reasons we still travel to places like Italy, to see the enduring beauty they created. And I feel like that’s what we do at Thrive Collective today—create something lasting. My time at NYU was a major part of developing that understanding.

Read more about Jeremy’s journey and the founding of Thrive Collective in his 2022 TedX talk, “Live ARTfully: Six Essential Questions for Creating Masterpiece Lives.”

When he was a film student at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts alum Brendan Bubion (TSOA ’15) produced and directed a short documentary, Roots of Resilience, about the creation of the post-Hurricane Sandy mural, Resilience, at PS329 in Coney Island.