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The Challenge

Who Made it Happen?

• "Education is not filling the pail: It is lighting the fire." 
  William Butler Yeats, poet.
  
  
• It is important to foster visual literacy at a time when visual stimuli increasingly dominate experience. Contemporary art, design, and media offer compelling and useful ways to dissect, understand, and connect with the world.
  
  
• Play, the forerunner of culture, is the laboratory in which the imaginary and the everyday are invoked, explored, and transformed.
  
  
• Creativity is not, by any means, the exclusive province of art. There is great value, however, in art experiences that are self-defined, flexible, and engaging. Such experiences become translatable and transportable to other areas of life.
  
  
• Art making demonstrates the profound idea that each of us has the power to take a concept or a vision and give it concrete form in the world. Creativity builds self-esteem, a necessary ingredient for success.
  
  
• Viewers are stimulated by environments open to discovery. LACMALab is committed to raising questions about and eliciting responses to visual experience. 
  
  
• Instruction through closed hierarchical systems that use control and intimidation shuts down thinking or produces boredom.
  
  
• Understanding and participating in the art-making process heightens the capacity for critical thinking, problem solving, risk taking, and managing ambiguity and paradox.
  
  
• Children learn best through art experiences that engage them with their parents, teachers, and other adults in their lives.
  
  
• Museums are public spaces that should speak to multiple generations simultaneously.
  
  
• Varied learning styles and the intuitive function of emotional intelligence can be acknowledged and embraced through meaningful experiences with art and art making.
  
  
• Artists, curators, and designers are resources for new models of learning and act as vital forces in the construction of culture.
  
  
• In the future, museums will need to reimagine their relationships to art, artists, and audience. LACMALab strives to be in the forefront of that development.