Children's Museum Of The Arts Launches Vision Fund & Children's Variety TV Show

Children's Museum of the Arts has announced the Vision Fund, a new fund created to support the museum's reimagined vision as it expands its unique programming and initiatives, including the forthcoming Look Make Show, a weekly interactive, online variety show where child and adult artists work together to take on important questions of our time. The Vision Fund will launch on November 16, 2020, and the Look Make Show will launch in 2021, with the first episode examining monuments.

"With this fund, we're making a full-throated commitment to the idea that all children are artists - not future artists or budding artists or artists-in-training - but artists whose creative processes are vital contributions to the world," said CMA Executive Director Seth Cameron. "Everything should be art, and this ideal becomes far more practicable when we recognize that all art is a collaboration - that it doesn't exist in some vacuum of genius, but is a relational experience that becomes more beautiful, more meaningful, and more nuanced when more people of different ages are engaged."

The new fund supports the museum's refreshed mission statement to unite children and artists to create and share ambitious new works of art with their communities and the world. With this fund, CMA will continue to expand its programming and school partnerships across the city, and offer specialized programs for children with physical disabilities, children on the autism spectrum, and families with children in the foster care system.

The main goal of this fund is to support the development of the Look Make Show, named after CMA's pedagogy "Look Make Share," in which children investigate works of art, use that inspiration to create their own pieces, and share their works with peers. The show is based on the principle that all children are artists; everyone is born with the capacity to contribute meaningfully to the conversation of art and the development of form, and adults have as much to learn from children as they do from us. Geared towards children ages five to twelve, the television show bridges education and entertainment to answer today's important questions, about art, our world, and everything between. Each episode will take on a theme - the first episode will address monuments - and feature short, interactive segments such as skits, singalongs, art-making, animation, puppet characters and more. The weekly series will invite children through school visits, Weekend Open Studios, and After School programs to participate in the making of the show.

The Look Make Show, which will launch in 2021, represents CMA's integrated approach to engaging children, artists, their communities and the world. In addition to the fund, a series of programs will be implemented to increase engagement from the local to the global level, including a residency program in which an artist and a neighborhood will be selected to collaborate on the creation of new artwork and public programming, and gallery partnerships where children will be invited to exhibition-making camps held at New York City galleries. These programs will be regularly highlighted in the Look Make Show.

Through the fund, CMA will expand its 30 year commitment to creating opportunities for children and their families to make art side-by-side with artists. From its origins as a small storefront project in SoHo serving local families, the museum has expanded over the decades, accommodating a more robust exhibition program of contemporary art, as well as classrooms and specialized facilities for media arts.