Art education is caught in the midst of debates concerning the meaning of teaching and learning especially in the urban education context. Social justice for instance is an urban education issue that calls for education reform. This study will provide a working description of art education for social justice in terms of its rationale, goals, and content. It will explain what a social justice art program aspires to do for 21st century students and communities. It will explore what knowledge, value, skills, and dispositions are that prove central to a social justice art curriculum. It will also describe the issues of art education in social justice and analyze their implications for art teaching and learning in a social justice art curriculum in urban education. In conclusions, social justice art education aims to cultivate visually literate students by creating, presenting, connecting, and analyzing their life experiences and allowing them to gain a better understanding of how others experience the world. Social justice art education also serves to foster a students’ understanding of social issues that are relevant to or occur within the social, cultural, and economic contexts that are understood by students. The recommendation for future art teachers is that, as educators, they should understand students’ relationships with the real world so that they can help them to develop their potential and build the connection between community, public, and classroom in order to find effective teaching strategies to foster students’ skills of analysis and critical thinking.