City of Palo Alto (Palo Alto Art Center)

The Palo Alto Art Center will research, prototype, test, and evaluate an interactive kit to help children and families explore the center's temporary exhibitions through art making. The program is a response to parents' need for tools to help them use visits to the center as a catalyst for making art and spending meaningful time together as a family. The development of the kits embraces challenges common to smaller, non-collecting art centers - creating adaptive opportunities for family engagement that can be used with successive exhibitions that encourage repeat visits and provide new experiences, and that engage adults as well as children. The new discovery kits will increase the comfort of parents and caregivers in engaging with their children in the art center's exhibitions and inspire them to return. The art center also aims to make the kits replicable for other non-collecting institutions.