Grantees
and Partners

Cool Culture

Overview

Cool Culture amplifies the voices of families and strengthens the power of historically marginalized communities through engagement with art and culture, both within cultural institutions and beyond. They utilize the arts and culture, social justice principles, and partnerships with community stakeholders to enhance the well being of families and their communities.

Grant

Purpose: To support Cool Culture’s flagship Citywide Cultural Access initiative and to expand and deepen We Are All Curators programs, including the launch of We Are A Work of Art, Health + Wellbeing.

While Citywide Cultual Access works at a macro level to systemically break down the barriers to access art and culture in NYC, We Are All Curators works at a hyperlocal neighborhood level to directly nurture the art and culture heritage of historically marginalized communities. We Are All Curators programs include:

• We Are All Curators: For Families, a neighborhood-based program for families with young children that offers intensive, culturally responsive, cohort-based arts workshops, guided by community interests and concerns.
• We Are All Curators: For Educators, a professional development series and peer-to-peer learning workshop for early childhood education teams – including teachers, parent liaisons, and school administrators – that supports using the arts and social justice concepts to create safe, artistic, culturally responsive, and joyous learning environments for young children.
• We Are All Curators: For Teachers and Community Creators, a pilot artist commissioning program that creates a cohort of BIPOC-identified artists, parents, and cultural workers who participate in an 8-month fellowship that gives them the tools to use art and culture as agents of change within museum spaces and directly in their own communities – neighborhoods disproportionately harmed by COVID-19.

Impact

Each year, the Citywide Cultural Access initiative connects a community of over 50,000 families from over 450 early childhood centers and Title 1 schools and provides them with unlimited free access to 90+ NYC cultural institutions. Over the last two decades, Citywide Cultural Access has built a network of relationships that now includes millions of alumni throughout the five boroughs, and Cool Culture families continue to make more than 185,000 visits to partner museums each year. In 2022, We Are All Curators launched We Are A Work of Art, a series of health and wellbeing festivals called Jamborees that brought families and communities together to create, heal, and share cultural traditions and interests in collaboration with two of Cool Culture’s partner museums, the Brooklyn Museum and Lewis Latimer House Museum.

 

Cool Culture at the Studio Museum in Harlem