By Meredith Hayes

The Tucson Museum of Art is happy to include our good news with readers of westmuse. In fact we have lots of good news happening here. Our admissions have more than doubled over last year (of course Ansel Adams might have something to do with that, but we’ll take it in this day and age). And we have recently received a major grant for our education programs.

Along with other grantees, the Tucson Museum of Art was awarded a $50,000 grant from the MetLife Foundation's Museum and Community Connections program. It's a fantastic, national program – for more information click here.

MetLife Foundation's Museum and Community Connections grant will help support the Museum's ongoing commitment to free onsite and offsite programming for underserved populations. Some of the onsite programs that will benefit include the popular Picture This! Art for Families, a free monthly program with gallery tours and art making for children and their adult companions; scholarships for the Summer Youth Art program, which annually awards free multiple art classes to nearly 35 children from low-income families each summer; and weekly gallery tours and art making for people with dementia.

Outreach programs such as Creative Connections, a program that brings weekly art projects to critically-ill children at Tucson Medical Center and University Medical Center, and art history and art education programs in area schools, libraries, and senior living community centers will also benefit.

Programs designed to attract Tucson's growing immigrant communities was specifically targeted in the grant. These programs will help them learn about Tucson and be more involved in activities and events meant to expose their art and culture to the community at-large.

We are so pleased to be a part of this grant whose goal is to broaden arts programming and promote museums as centers of education without boundaries. All of us in the museum world know how important community outreach and education are to what we do everyday. We are not just buildings with art. We are a thriving part of our communities. With support and recognition from major foundations like MetLife, we can continue to help educate our children and citizens on the beauty and power of art.