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Art education grants to help child-care providers
Tuesday, January 23, 2001 By Sally Kalson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Art is good for children -- seeing it and creating it. To support that premise, a new campaign seeks to improve the quality of art education for young children by offering mini-grants to licensed child-care providers.
Fifteen grants of $1,000 each are up for grabs from Celebrating Those Who Care, a partnership of Shady Lane School, the Office of Child Development at the University of Pittsburgh and the Cyert Center for Early Childhood Education at Carnegie Mellon University.
The grants are an incentive for providers to integrate art into their programming and improve the quality of art offerings overall. Winners will be selected by a panel including educators and artists.
As part of the campaign, the sponsors commissioned an original piece of artwork by Mary Hamilton, whose brightly colored linoleum-block prints are instantly recognizable from the official T-shirts of the Three Rivers Arts Festival and A Fair in the Park.
The Heinz Endowments provided funding to reproduce the print in poster form and distribute it to every licensed child care program in Allegheny County -- 1,000 in all. Along with each poster comes an invitation to seek one of the grants, including an application and instructions.
The review panel will be looking for "best practices" in arts programming, as well as a variety of organizational types and geographic locations.
All licensed providers are eligible to apply -- child care centers, family day care homes, family support centers, Head Start and Early Head Start. Accreditation by the National Association for the Education of Young Children is not a prerequisite.
"Our aim [in the poster] is to increase awareness of the importance of caregivers for young children -- not just paid caregivers but also families, neighbors and relatives," said Cindy Bahn, project coordinator of Shady Lane Resources, the school's training arm.
The consortium plans to offer the grants and the posters annually, Bahn said, with a different artist each time.
Hamilton came up with her print design -- a parade of children and caregivers joined by her trademark dogs, birds and angels -- after a discussion with the campaign's organizers.
"They told me what they wanted to express about the job of care-giving and all the different types of caregivers there might be," said Hamilton from her farm in Rimersburg, Clarion County.
Barking in the background was Sundance, the family Belgian shepherd, who appears in all of the artist's prints.
"I actually drew her before I ever got her," Hamilton said. "I was paging through a dog encyclopedia and came to this breed. It hit me that this was the dog I've always drawn without even knowing it existed. So of course, I had to get one."
Hamilton's menagerie also includes Olivia, whom she calls "a regulation American barn cat," and several peacocks.
On the back of each poster is a short story explaining how she became an artist.
She was 2 years old, and her parents lived in an apartment in eastern Pennsylvania. Their landlord had just painted the walls a bright, new white.
One day, young Mary drew a design with her green crayon from the top to the bottom of the wall beside the stairs. She imagined it was a circus parade.
"I'm sure my mother was horrified," she wrote, but instead of reacting negatively, she made an exhibit space and gave Mary a stack of paper and some tape. From then on, the child spent many happy hours drawing.
"I often wonder what course my career might have taken if my parents had not responded in such a loving and understanding way," Hamilton wrote, adding, "As you might see from the "Celebrating Those Who Care" print.... I have not lost my fondness for drawing parades."
Bahn noted the campaign still has 50 of Hamilton's signed and numbered prints for sale to the public ($75 unframed; $135 framed). Also for sale are T-shirts ($7 for children; $10 for adults) and note cards ($6 for a package of eight). All proceeds benefit the mini-grants.
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