Creating traveling exhibitions and accompanying catalogs is at the core of The Foundation for Art & Design’s mission. However we don’t believe that our mission stops there. Our role is to support local museums and exhibitors, to that end we create site specific designs, customizable posters, invitations, and press materials, as well as exhibition related programming designed to foster community engagement and help visitors deepen their experience.
We are committed to helping museums and exhibitors foster more dynamic community engagement by making our exhibitions relevant for each visitor, no matter their age or place in life. We hope to create experiences where kids and young adults can learn and enjoy together with the adults who take care of them. With this in mind, we want to bring a broad cultural offering that will not only foster learning, but will also provide the community with fun, healthy, and fulfilling activities, bringing as many opportunities as possible, fostering community interaction with arts and design, and giving an impulse to community-developed projects to ensure growth and new opportunities for everyone, including adults who might want to learn new skills or polish some they already have. This includes seminars and trainings that will connect the community through the common thread of our arts and design program.
Our education program is based on the certainty that connections to the arts help build cognitive, social, and emotional skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, language skills, visual and spatial skills, empathy, leadership, decision-making, risk-taking, and inventiveness, among others. Fostering the development of these elements impacts students’ academic performance and their overall wellbeing. Our methodology aims to serve classroom teachers to approach students and subjects in ways that foster learning, using arts based tools to teach across the curriculum, focusing on facilitating the encounter between students and the arts experience, because that’s where children can make meaningful connections that will foster learning and development. With that goal, we create specific education guides around each exhibition, bringing into the classrooms a program centered on using imagination and storytelling. We also offer workshops and sessions facilitated by our teaching artists, adapted to the students’ needs and, specifically, to those with disabilities.