Support Art Center for Kids

Welcome to Art Center for Kids

Art Center for Kids offers a range of unique design courses that teach critical thinking, innovation, and visual literacy. The program aims to nurture creativity in young children in grades 4 through 8 and help them to become designers of their own world.

Art Center for Kids classes meet for seven-week sessions on Sundays from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. at Art Center College of Designs Hillside and South Campuses in Pasadena throughout the year.

Open House
Art Center welcomes elementary and middle school students, parents and educators to our Open House, which is held at the end of each session for all Art Center for Kids classes. Please refer to the calendar for Open House dates. All Art Center for Kids classes, except for the digital media classes, meet in the cafeteria at the Hillside Campus from 4 to 5 pm to exhibit their work. The digital media classes meet in their assigned classrooms at the South Campus. The Open House is a great opportunity to learn more about the courses offered through Art Center for Kids.

Class Size
Classes will generally have a maximum of 15 students. Enrollment sizes may vary from class to class. All classes are filled on a first come, first served basis. See registration info for details.

Tuition
Tuition at Art Center for Kids is $260 for all courses except Photography. Photography is $275. This fee includes the cost of all materials.

Catalog
If you would like to be placed on our mailing list to receive our next catalog, please fill out the request a catalog form and click "submit."


Imagine mars

Art Center for Kids goes to Mars
Every spring, all participants in Art Center for Kids will have an exciting opportunity to envision life on Mars in cooperation with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratorys Imagine Mars Program. Young artists and designers, working together, will explore ways to create an ideal community on Mars.

Sometimes it also takes leaving ones familiar surroundings to better understand them. This unique partnership will allow students to do just that. All classes will focus on one common theme: imagining our future life on Mars. Students will translate this theme through the many disciplines represented in the program - from architecture, industrial design and digital media to illustration, graphic design and fine art.

The Imagine Mars program is a celebration of innovation and creativity. This fertile ground for creativity and innovation mirrors the core values of the Art Center for Kids program, to help children become designers of their own world. Imagining the future will hopefully kindle the desire to create a better future and inform these young adventurers of ways to bring their ideas to life.

For more information, visit imaginemars.jpl.nasa.gov

The Art Center for Kids program is open to students in grades 4-8 at the colleges hillside and south campuses.

"The future is not some place we are going to, it is one we are creating. The paths to it are not found, but made, and the making of these pathways changes both the maker and the destination."

--UNESCO, "Qualities Required of Education Today to Meet Foreseeable Demands in the Twenty-first Century," 1989, p.9

You cant invent the future if you arent capable of doing new things and simply repeat what other generations have done. Design education is a wonderful vehicle for personal discovery, problem-solving and innovation. The benefits in childrens lives are many, from helping develop creative skills and promoting teamwork to building academic skills and inspiring career goals.

When Tink Adams founded Art Center College of Design 75 years ago, his mission was to create the best art and design school in the world. His plan: Hire an accomplished faculty of professionals, not a professional faculty to educate the future leaders in design. We applied this model to educate teens in high school over 50 years ago in our Saturday High program.

What Tink Adams never envisioned was taking the Art Center model and adapting it to educate children in elementary and middle schools, teaching them to think as designers who see with their minds, who organize information with a design sense, and who create things weve never seen before.

That was our plan for Art Center for Kids, a recent addition to the family of K-12 programs at the College. The goal of this unique program is to nurture creativity and help children become designers of their own world. By providing children with challenging activities in many areas, we hope to help them develop their own methods of investigating ideas and discover new ways of expressing themselves.

To that end, Art Center faculty have created classes that foster new ways of thinking, seeing and doing. These classes reflect the many disciplines taught at the college. Various members of the Art Center community teach this innovative curriculum: faculty, alumni, and graduate and undergraduate students.

The future is now. The Art Center for Kids program is an important bridge to that future.

- Paula Goodman, Director, K-12 Public Programs
Paula Goodman
Director, K-12 Public Programs
Art Center for Kids B.A., M.A., UC Berkeley, Université de Bordeaux, UCLA. Formerly associate chair, Advertising Department, Art Center. Copywriter, Grey Advertising, NW Ayer, Foote, Cone & Belding, Bass/Yager. Feature film translator/subtitler, United Artists and MGM. French and English teacher, Beverly Hills High School.