Grant Program: Community Grants 2024
Funders: Smart and Caring Fund, Adine Mees and David van Seters Family Fund, Howard Martin Memorial Fund
The West Vancouver Art Museum builds awareness of diverse forms of contemporary and historical art, architecture, and design, engaging audiences with issues and ideas central to the community and the world beyond.
The Family Art Project was able to expand to offer bi-weekly programs thanks in part to this grant funding. This program is open to people of all ages, but geared towards young children and their care-givers. It is facilitated by a contract employee and the Assistant Curator. Current funding from the WVF will pay for the program until March 2024. We are seeking funding to continue to deliver the program from April 2024 until March 2025. Since we started this program in 2019 with the assistance of Community Grants from the West Vancouver Foundation, WVAM! Family Art Project has been a popular addition to our nine Spring and Summer Camps each year, along with our weekly courses, and on-site and off-site classroom sessions, which typically operate at full capacity.
This year, we were very excited to start offering the WVAM! Drop-In Family Art Project twice per month earlier this year. This initiative was highly successful, with full attendance at each session. We continued to offer this workshop in conjunction with our exhibitions, exploring themes related to each exhibition. We are very proud to continue to offer this free, and highly accessible program to the community and beyond.
We often hear that WVAM! is a much welcomed opportunity for families with children to bond with one another, learn about materials, engage with learning through art, and to build connections with other community members. For a large portion of those who join us for WVAM!, English is their second language, many gave recently immigrated to Canada, so it is an effective platform for these families to integrate into the community. We have worked to promote inclusivity from our exhibition planning to the program itself by welcoming families to explore artworks from diverse artists and reflect on key topics, such as Canada’s colonial history, migration, and Indigenous art, with the aim that the diverse local community can see themselves reflected in the programming.
We are delighted to see the same families returning to our programs regularly. It is heartening to build strong relationships with community members and to share West Vancouver’s rich arts and culture history, both past and present, with them. WVAM! has consistently been a place for families to express themselves freely. I have seen incredibly creative artistic responses to the works on display that are always so unique to the students who create them. I have also witnessed parents become highly involved in creating along-side their kids, and be equally interested in exploring new materials.
Want to support more programs like this at the West Vancouver Art Museum? They have 2 funds at the Foundation that you can donate to:
