Passion. Power. Creativity.
The Mission: We Inspire Art is guided by a passionate belief in the power of art to spark creativity as well as support social progress. We give voice to artists’ ideas and projects. We are enthusiastic about their vision and we provide opportunities to showcase their work and expand their practices so that they can take bold risks that benefit process, content, and possibilities.
We cultivate the creation and development of expression and education in all forms of art. We provide information resources, events, networking opportunities, funding for children’s arts programming, and advocacy on behalf of the Arts.
. . . the arts have been an inseparable part of the human journey; indeed, we depend on the arts to carry us toward the fullness of our humanity. We value them for themselves, and because we do, we believe knowing and practicing them is fundamental to the healthy development of our children’s minds and spirits. That is why, in any civilization – ours included – the arts are inseparable from the very meaning of the term ‘education.’ We know from long experience that no one can claim to be truly educated who lacks basic knowledge and skills in the arts.”
–National Standards for Arts Education
Our WHY: Children need the arts, offering them this type of education is imperative. The arts are a vital part of American culture and life. In 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts was created by Congress to ensure funding for new and existing art forms in the country. In recent decades, sadly, the arts have had a much more difficult time getting support and funding at both local and national levels and are often the first programs to be cut in schools and universities when it comes time to strip budgets. Lack of support for the arts, will over time, produce a culture that is devoid of creative spirit. Creativity by definition is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination. A cultural loss of creativity will result in a society that is hard, dry and unable to innovate. We are of the mind that this will not happen on our watch…we intend to do as much as we can to see that children are offered education in the arts.