APRIL 2022
To our families & education partners
We are excited to bring back ArtVenture, our monthly e-newsletter featuring Cool Culture events, museum exhibitions, spotlights on families and educators, and great resources for engaging in art. This issue features:
03 Cool Culture Community 04 - 05 Spring is here: April 2022 Calendar 06 Family Pass Update 07 - 08 We Are A Work of Art: Health + Wellbeing Initiative 09 - 10 Curators for Families Family Day! 11 - 12 Cool Kidz! 13 Educators’ Corner
Cool Culture Community You are my other me. What I do to you, I do to myself. - Mayan concept of In lak’ech ala k’in
We want to acknowledge and express gratitude to all of our volunteers, museums, speakers, artists, caregivers, and educators we worked with between January and March 2022: Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Bushwick Grind Cafe, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, DOH Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness, Doctor 'Simbo Ige, Doctors for America, Elizabeth Velasquez, El Museo del Barrio, Gabriela Fullon, Guarav Dangol, Key Club at Stuyvesant High School, Luz Cañas, May Vutrapongvatana (from Council member Chi Ossé’s office), Maya Feller, New Museum, Rena Anakwe, Stacey Johnson, Tania Romero, The Brooklyn Museum, and Veronica Agard.
Thank you for being a part of what makes our community so special!
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Spring is here! Spring is here and spring recess for schools is around the corner. With warmer weather comes more opportunities to take trips to museums, gardens, and zoos across the city and create unforgettable memories with your families at art and cultural events around New York City. Though Covid-19 remains a concern, museums are beginning to adjust Covid-19 protocols for admission to safely welcome families back. Take a look at our program calendar for April with Cool Culture programming and exhibitions hosted by some of our cultural partners!
We have specially curated the list to focus on our Health + Wellbeing initiative and exhibitions that specifically focus on how we can transform our communities together through re-imagination.
We hope you feel inspired and energized after visiting these exhibitions and events. Click on the link for a Family Mind, Body, Spirit Checklist to use before, during and at the end of your museum visit.
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april 2022 sunday
monday
tuesday
wednesday
thursday
KEY Curators for Families is a cohort program for educators, caregivers and their families. New enrollment is currently closed, but ALL FAMILIES are invited to Family Day. Curators for Educators is offered to educators from centers and schools enrolled in the Family Pass Program.
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Art Access: Open Studio, Queens Museum 11am - 1:30pm
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CURATORS FOR FAMILIES cohort meeting [11am-12pm/ virtual]
CURATORS FOR FAMILIES cohort meeting [11am-12pm/ virtual]
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CURATORS FOR EDUCATORS Seminar Designing a Cool Pop Up [1011am/virtual]
MOCAKIDS
Puppets on the Passover Table, Brooklyn Children’s Museum [3:30-4:15pm]
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Duro Olowu Selects, Cooper Hewitt Museum [ongoing]
The Happiness Experiment, New York Hall of Science [ongoing]
CURATORS FOR EDUCATORS Dialogue Wellbeing as a Community Value [10am-12pm/virtual]
Art Lab: Line, Shape, Color, MoMA
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friday
saturday
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Raise Your Voice, Puppets of NY, Museum of the City New York [ongoing exhibit]
Celebrate Holi, Brooklyn Children’s Museum 10am - 12:30pm 1- 3:30pm 4 - 6:30pm
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Storytime at Home: Love Yourself!, Museum of Chinese in America [4-4:45pm/virtual]
DOE Spring Break begins
Healing Practices Exhibition and Healing through Art Sessions [1-3 pm. Saturdays] Rubin Museum
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Sabado Familiar El Museo Del Barrio
Before Yesterday We Could Fly, The MET [ongoing]
DOE Spring Break ends
28 MOCAKIDS Storytime
at Home: Love Yourself!, Museum of Chinese in America [4-4:45pm/virtual]
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30 CURATORS FOR FAMILIES Family Day! [11am-1pm/ virtual]
Have You Used Your Family Pass Yet?
Our last round to register for the Family Pass closed on March 4th. If you registered for this round, you should expect to receive your Family pass early to mid April! If you registered for a Family Pass before March 4th and still have not received it, please send an email to our Program Manager, Tra Nguyen at family@coolculture.org to get important updates on when your pass should arrive. As you look for different options for visiting museums, gardens, and zoos across the city, we encourage you to check out our online visitation portal to learn important safety protocols and vaccine requirements before your visit. page 6
WE ARE A WORK OF ART: HEALTH + WELLBEING INITIATIVE We launched the We Are A Work of Art: Health + Wellbeing Initiative in January to promote holistic wellness - mind, body, spirit and civic - in our communities through hosting family events, providing reliable information, and wellbeing resources from BIPOC practitioners and our community members. See a snippet of our launch video and hear a message from Candice Anderson, our Executive Director, below. Be sure to check out our YouTube page to watch the full video and, do breathing exercises with Baba Oludaré of Kiire Wellness.
See the full video here Cool Culture - We Are a Work of Art - Health + Wellbeing Initiative
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Health and Wellbeing Jamboree Highlights Our Jamborees at Lewis Latimer House Museum (February 19th) and Brooklyn Children’s Museum (March 27th) brought families together, despite the cold weather, for cultural wellbeing activities and art-making.
A Cool Culture family taking a glide on Brooklyn Children’s Museum ArtRink
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Curators for Families Family Day! Curators for Families holds artmaking and art viewing sessions called Family Day the last Saturday of every month. Family Day is an opportunity for educators and caretakers across cohorts to design activities for families in their schools and centers centered around health and wellbeing and social justice. During our first in-person Family Day in March, educators and caretakers from P.S. 705 Brooklyn Arts and Sciences Elementary School and Excellence Baby Academy came
together to plan a fun and engaging artmaking workshop for families in their schools and centers to celebrate how we uniquely embody our many identities. The Brooklyn cohort of families and educators brought in Yahoteh from BK Music Learning and artist-in-residence Kazue Taguchi from the Museum of Arts and Design to lead everyone in a music learning activity and a jewelrymaking workshop.
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Curators for Families Family Day!
A special shout out to a long-time Cool Culture educator, Jessica Sain, for offering this event at her school and to all the educators and caretakers in the Brooklyn cohort for making the event so meaningful. Caretaker testimonial
Eric Gottlieb, caretaker: “We had a blast at the Cool Culture’s [Family Day]. I think our favorite part was definitely the collaborative dancing and getting to make crafts and use them - together with all the other kids. It was really great for bonding.” If you would like to attend our next Family Day on April 30th. Please send an email to our program coordinator Alexandra Shoneyin at learning@coolculture.org to receive the zoom link.
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COOL Kidz! CREATE A WELLBEING POSTER Cool Culture’s We Are A Work of Art: Health + Wellbeing Initiative is inspired by the belief that we're all in this together. We want to encourage each of us to take time out of our day to take care of our minds, bodies, and spirits. We invite you to create poster art that expresses what wellbeing means to you and to advocate for social changes you wish to see. We'll put your designs online and on social media. The deadline for submission is June 30, 2022.
When you're ready, click on the button below for step-by-step instructions on how to submit your poster art. Share your artwork here
HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR ARTWORK: We have informational flyers in ENGLISH, SPANISH and CHINESE with a description of the activity and how to prepare your poster for submission. which can also be used to support conversations with families, educators and others who you think would benefit from taking a restorative moment.
Poster submission titled "Rainbow Mood" by Roberta Nunez (caretaker) and children Brady and Noah from Union Carver Early Learn Program
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COOL Kidz!
Create and Grow Looking for a fun and environmentally-friendly activity for your children to do at home? Check out this video created by Aly Stoffo, GlamGardenerNYC, to learn how to make Monarch Butterfly Maracas. We hope your family enjoys playing with the sounds and textures of the maracas. When you’re ready to discard them, be sure to recycle the water bottle used and plant any seeds you used in the ground to grow beautiful flowers! We’d love to see your creations! Please post pictures of your maracas on Cool Culture social media pages. @coolculture
CoolCulture
Pictured L - R: Ivy after creating her Monarch maraca at home. Cailynn holding up a Cool Culture toolkit at Family Day.
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Educators' Corner
We appreciate the support of our educators in ensuring our families have access to artmaking, storytelling and curation. Thank you! In turn, we’re pleased to offer you Curators for Educators that includes monthly Seminars and Dialogues to support your work with families and expand the conversation on wellbeing in schools and communities. We hope you’ll reserve time in your day for the virtual events this month and look out for next month’s issue where we return to hosting the final session in-person! If you are an educator at one of our partner schools or centers, please register for the following events below. Seminar Designing a Cool Pop Up at Museums, Gardens & Zoos April 13 - 10:00-11:00am Dialogue Wellbeing as a Community Value April 19 - 10:00am-12:00pm More about Curators for Educators: Curators for Educators ignites educators' approaches to providing families with culturally responsive introductions to the City’s often-intimidating network of cultural institutions and helping them to embrace artistic practice as a means to strengthen learning, healing, families and communities.
Remember to check out the resources and see past sessions in our Cool Culture Community Resource Folder. Photo captions: Emily Mello, Senior Associate Director of New Museum, and Jasmin Tabatabaee, Assistant Education Specialist share images from Faith Ringgold: American People exhibition at Curators for Educator Seminar #2: We are All Curators.
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