As an old proverb tells us, “It takes a village to raise a child.”

Indeed, the village we build around our children today becomes the community they grow up in.

Someday, it becomes the community they help shape.

Here are some of the ways your support helps to vitalize the lives of our community’s youngest members through the arts and humanities, providing them with opportunities to learn, create, and grow.

AFTER SCHOOL ART

After School Art shows how far a little community support can go. Thanks to a variety of donors and partners, including our friends at the General Federation of Women’s Clubs Big Rapids, After School Art is 100% free for children ages 7-13.

The program creates a place for those children to come together, unwind, and create something after regular school hours. There are no grades, no tests, and no pressure - just the simple joy of making art.

Each week of After School Art brings with it a new art project.

One week, participants might create a two-dimensional painting; the next, they may find themselves making a sculpture out of glue and yarn.

But the goal is always the same: to provide children of all backgrounds and means with the opportunity to explore their own imaginations, sharpen their fine motor skills, and develop a love of learning that stays with them beyond the classroom.

Of course, there’s always the bonus of adding a new masterpiece to the refrigerator.

SUMMER CAMPS

Even when the school year ends, art continues to thrive at Artworks.

Summer Camps offer a longer, more immersive encounter with creativity. Participation fees cover the costs of materials and instruction; in return, campers can experience an array of different themes that occur over multiple weeks. Past camps have allowed participants to explore block printing, mold pottery, paint, sculpt, and so much more across multiple days of camp.

The goal of Artworks summer camps isn’t just to create art, but to create memories and foster a camp community.

Campers create together, learn together, eat together, and during breaks, visit the local park together. Campers from different school districts form friendships that endure across summers and memories that remain with them for life.

ART ATTACK

Art Attack features the work of K-12 students from across the Mecosta-Osceola Intermediate School District.

Begun in 1990, it’s our longest running exhibition. It’s also one of the only exhibitions big enough to flood beyond the walls of the Batdorff Gallery and into the Alley Gallery. Including woodworking, sculpture, paint, and even culinary design, hundreds of works of art by hundreds of students coat the walls of our galleries in a cacophony of color and inventiveness.

The explosive array is only possible through the collaboration of a community that works together. Artworks provides art supplies to the local schools, giving local educators the resources to do what they do best: encouraging students to dream, create, and shine as young artists.

The result of that collaboration becomes clear when those student artists receive the chance to find their work hanging from the walls of our galleries.

WHY WE DO CHILDREN’S PROGRAMMING

Artworks offers children’s programming because of one core belief: that the arts and humanities aren’t just an extracurricular activity, but an essential part of life.

By learning to make art, children build confidence and creativity. They learn to think critically about the visual world around them. They learn empathy by understanding the way a sculpture, painting, or drawing can convey emotions with more than words.

Those skills follow them into the next chapter of their lives.

In that way, Artworks’ children’s programming embodies our mission to nurture not only the next generation of artists, but thinkers, innovators, creators, and dreamers.

It takes a village to raise a child.

And your support builds that village for the children of this community.