Youth Award Winners

At the Spring 2006 Tempe Festival of the Arts, new adventures in creativity were launched by the ASU Art Museum, the Herberger College of Fine Arts, and the ASU Department of Art Education, who joined forces with the Festival to provide an array of demonstrations and instructions for hands-on kids’ artistry.

ASU’s Department of Art Education created a woven objects visual art curriculum in conjunction with the ASU Museum of Art and its current exhibition of basketry. The curriculum, offered to Valley schools, also was taught at the Tempe Festival of the Arts’ Kids Innovation Station area. Kids from preschool through Grade 12 were provided with age-appropriate creative basketry challenges.  In celebration, participants at Kids Innovation Station stepped off in a special parade through the Festival grounds, showing off their creations!

In addition to the basketry offerings, Herberger College For Kids instructors provided demonstrations and mini-lessons from each of the disciplines taught in their summer camps and classes for children. Pre-schoolers engaged in songs, movement, and instruments from the Kindermusik curriculum. Dance instructors taught a few steps in hip-hop, ballet, modern and jazz. Art instructors provided hands-on projects focusing on drawing, printmaking, and environmental art. Instructors from the award-winning ASU Theatre for Youth program demonstrated how to turn simple props into fascinating stories just by using one’s imagination. Also, a guitar instructor was on hand to teach a few basic skills on an acoustic guitar.

To commemorate its art education collaboration with ASU, the Tempe Festival of the Arts has created a new contest that reaches Kindergarten through Grade 12 students and their schools’ art departments. The contest invites teachers and students to enter their work in the new contest. The curriculum has not been developed yet for Spring 2007, but will be announced here first!

Entrants will display their work in the Kids Innovation Station area during the Festival, and be judged fork prizes of $200 cash each, to be awarded in each of four age categories for the winning school’s use in purchasing art supplies. In addition, winning student artists in the four age categories each will receive a cash prize of $50. Prizes will be awarded during the Tempe Festival of the Arts Artists’ Awards Dinner, presented by APS, on Saturday night, March 2.