Put your white gloves on before you touch any of my babies, right?

Because they deserve that level of respect.

I am a photographer.

I am mixed media visual artist.

But before anything, I am an educator.

I've been teaching for 15 years.

Blue Murphy's works often feature her students who attend Perry Street Prep, a tuition-free public charter school in Washington, D.C.

I'm trying to instill in my students that you are the art.

Seeing brown skin, dark brown skin beautiful, coily hair in art galleries makes you value that even more.

You're like, oh yeah, my skin is beautiful.

My hair is amazing.

It's a literal work of art.

That core memory can change you, right?

It can create some type of self-esteem and be like, you know what?

I am that girl.

I am the main character, right.

I am art.

When I see Ms.

Murphy's art, I feel really honored.

Seeing how her art has progressed and the meaning behind her art as I've gotten older, how I interpret it and understand it, it makes me proud.

Everybody is drawn to what her art means.

Murphy's art is unique and empowering, and it's designed to celebrate her students, like London, who still remembers the day they first met.

I think I was in fourth grade and I was coming inside from recess and we were in the lobby and she stopped me.

You say, let me take a photo of you.

So then I did like a series of portraits.

London was one of them where the students look like angels.

Some of her most striking pieces come from what she calls her red line series.

So redlining actually started in 1930s where the U.S.

Government and financial institutions took maps and literally drew red lines to determine which areas would be considered hazardous, undervalued, which usually meant poverty, which usually mean black or urban communities.

I started creating the redline series from that, this idea of like, your eyes are covered to the fact that.

The red line is surrounding you all the time.

For me, I think my students and teachers, we got so used to having less, but they were so blinded by the fact that it always existed.

I felt like the schools that are in Red Line districts and have less funding are at a disadvantage when it comes to those things.

When I see the progression and how her art has changed over the years, it makes me proud.

Just because we're in this district or this area or we live in this zip code doesn't mean we're any less important.

I want people to see red line people, right?

So if you live in a red line area, urban area, low poverty area, whatever you wanna call it, I want to see them as valuable.

Every single one of them are valuable and they should be treated as such.

For PBS News Student Reporting Labs, I'm Shane Mukasa in Washington, D.C.