Download the Catalog - Acrobat PDF format - Text format Tour Dates View the tour dates for this exhibit.

Every child deserves an opportunity to experience the arts. The arts are a valuable tool that can open doors, incite dreams, and build bridges. When thinking about art, many students remember their first clay sculpture, music lesson, or poetry study. Yet the arts take on many different roles within the lives of children. The arts are, in many cases, a vehicle for learning basic educational skills and identifying abilities.

VSA arts encourages students to pursue the arts in the classroom and at home. The power that is experienced when one creates can stretch any boundary and defy any limitation. Through the arts, we are able to identify talented children whose abilities may otherwise go unrecognized.

During the fall of 2004, VSA arts launched a call for art asking children to “Discover What Art Is…” We sent participants on a quest to experience art, not only to identify working artists, but to find art wherever they were and to experience it in a new way. The final exhibit featured in this catalogue takes the audience on a scavenger hunt to discover the arts from a child's perspective.

Through their creations, participants explore and share with us what they believe art is, artists that they have met, where they find it in their community, and why art is important. Children express how they see and experience the world around them -- the buildings, the sounds, the words and the motion--through the visual arts. When we set out to “Discover What Art Is…” we found out that art is, most importantly, a place where disability is welcome.

Tour Dates

October 1 - October 31, 2005
Garden State Discovery Museum
Cherry Hill, New Jersey

November 15, 2005 - February 28, 2006
The Iowa Children's Museum
Coralville, Iowa

April 11 - July 11, 2006
TECO Gallery of Children's Art
Children's Board of Hillsborough County
Tampa Bay, FL

August 1 - November 5, 2006
Childrens Museum of Winston-Salem
Winston-Salem, North Carolina

February 19 - April 27, 2007
McKenna Children’s Museum
New Braunfels, TX

May 25 - August 19, 2007
Minnesota Children's Museum
St. Paul, Minnesota

October 2007
The Family Museum
Bettendorf, Iowa