Museum Experience and Education

The Museum Experience and Education department encourages audiences to access personal creativity and proceeds from the belief that innovation is a skill that can be inspired, nurtured, and developed through learning about the arts. Programs such as lectures, gallery tours, artmaking workshops, and free community days promote lifelong learning. SJMA provides ongoing arts education for school children, educators, university faculty, and college students. Programs are intellectually rigorous, boldly open-minded, and accessible to the diverse constituents of the Bay Area. Hallmarks of SJMA's welcoming environment are its participatory gallery activities, which are conceived in tandem with the curatorial and marketing departments to encourage deeper engagement with the exhibitions and to promote a sense of creative play.

Onsite Programs: School Tour Program

Guided K–12 School Tours

Guided tours focus on the careful observation and discussion of a limited number of thoughtfully selected objects. Lessons conform to the California State Visual Art Standards of Artistic Perception, Aesthetic Valuing, and Connections, Relationships, Applications.

Two-Part Art K–12 School Tours

SJMA's premier field trip offering, Two-Part Art, encourages children to experience art as both viewer and maker. The program engages students with an hour-long, inquiry-based guided tour followed by a related hands-on artmaking activity led by an SJMA teaching artist. With grant support from the California Arts Council and Xilinx, SJMA was able to provide free Two-Part Art tours to 4096 students in Title 1 schools in FY19.

Kids' Art Camp

Art Camps offer a safe, fun, and enriching adventure for children ages six to fourteen. Campers grow creatively and strengthen their artistic capabilities while developing social and intellectual skills. Camps culminate in public exhibitions of student artwork and approximately 350 visitors, including the young artists' friends and family members, all celebrated student creativity. Support from the California Arts Council allowed SJMA to provide offsite summer camp programming for students at two Title 1 schools (Grant Elementary and Horace Mann Elementary) in the San José Unified School District.

In-School Programs: Classroom Residencies

Sowing Creativity

Sowing Creativity is an integrated visual arts residency program developed by the San José Museum of Art to address the California Common Core State Standards and to meet the urgent need to promote creativity across disciplines. Sowing Creativity places the Museum's veteran teaching artists in classrooms for ten consecutive weeks of scaffolded art lessons designed to build creativity while introducing students to critical cross-curricular STEM concepts. The program responds to the longterm achievement gap in STEM subjects by using art to promote at-risk students' academic engagement with STEM at crucial "turning point" moments in elementary school. The program originally focused on serving third-grade students through an art and science curriculum. In FY19 the Museum rolled out a new fourth-grade art and math curriculum called "Show Your Work." It uses art to teach scale, proportion, symmetry, and fractions. This year the Museum also developed and beta tested the program's fifth-grade art-and-engineering curriculum. All Sowing Creativity students visit the Museum for an inquiry-based tour and a hands-on artmaking activity.

Multi-Part Art

The Multi-Part Art program extends SJMA's visual arts education resources directly into Santa Clara County schools via six-, eight- or ten-week residencies. Conducted by studio arts educators, this program delivers a series of stimulating artmaking experiences in the school classroom, where professional artists lead students in challenging and engaging hands-on art activities for 60 to 90 minutes. With a focus on Museum exhibitions, this progressive program gives students an in-depth, hands- and brains-on art experience. Students visit SJMA to build on the classroom experience and participate in active discussions about original works of art. Back in the classroom, students continue to learn art skills and create their own work inspired by the art and artists they have encountered.

Let's Look at Art

Let's Look at Art (LLAA) is a free classroom-based docent program that that serves more than 30,000 students in Santa Clara County each year and reaches all 31 of San José 's school districts. Forty-eight percent of the students served by this highimpact program are based in low-income Title I schools. For many, it is their first introduction to art. LLAA brings trained SJMA docents to K–12 classrooms to lead students in a lively hour-long inquiry-based discussion of reproductions of well-known works of art. Students learn vocabulary, cultural literacy, and concepts that align with California's Visual and Performing Arts standards—state-wide core requirements that many schools find difficult to meet. Portfolio programs incorporate postersized reproductions to serve K–5 students while Art in the Dark digital programs serve grades 6–12 and include a teacher's guide that provides vocabulary, subject matter, and suggestions for follow-up activities to accompany the in-classroom presentation.

Teach er Professional Development

As Silicon Valley's leading institution dedicated to the art of our time, SJMA presents modern and contemporary exhibitions—the perfect backdrop for writing assignments, research projects, and exploring the creative process. Teachers participate in a customized experience with SJMA's professional education staff. For example, museum studies or education students explore the constructivist nature of learning in art museums with SJMA's director of education, gallery teachers, and teaching artists.

Every year SJMA hosts the Marion Cilker Conference for Arts Education. Cosponsored by the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San José State University and the Santa Clara County Office of Education, this event brings pre-K to 8th-grade teachers together with local artists and arts organizations to share the joy of teaching through the art.

New Access Program: Free Individual Admission for K-12, College students, and Educators

In March 2019, SJMA launched a new access program that gives free admission to youth through age 17, college students with ID, and teachers. This significant reduction in admissions fees, intended to build closer ties with the community and to promote return visitation, resulted in a 60% increase in attendance from college students in the first three months.