It's really difficult to talk about building community in the classroom without sounding naive about the prevalence of certain socially disruptive factors, and being idealistic about how a community can be effectively formed in spite of these challenges.
All a teacher can do initially is to make efforts from the beginning of the school year to create an environment where everyone is accepted and valued, by encouraging diverse views, appearances, and art-making, and enforcing a classroom policy in which one must leave negative things such as gang-related speech and actions outside of the room, perhaps even in order to enter the room.
A big part of when this community can be encouraged is in collaboration during work time and during sharing and critiques. If the teacher opens up to the students and encourages them to do the same, a number of students may follow, and members of the class may get to know each other as individuals, breaking barriers that exist outside of the art room.
In order for this to be truly effective, all students in the room must be invited to participate, and this community must be made attractive to each individual student by the teacher and others who have come on board. How to make community attractive depends completely on the students' interests.
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Way to get down to it. When I was writing my response I felt like I was describing a Utopia without any distractions, but the truth of the matter is that there will be many for us to learn how to handle. I enjoyed the manner in which you plan to build a community by avoiding distractions by enganging lessons in students' interests.
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