Through its Children's Performing Arts Program, the LBC offers performing arts programming designed especially for young audiences. In the current school year, 47 Children's Performing Arts Program performances will be offered at the LBC. School shows will reach nearly 32,000 school children in grades preschool through twelve. An additional 16,200 people are projected to attend family shows which are offered in the early evening and on weekends to encourage participation by entire families. Fall School and Family Show performances included Fred Garbo’s Inflatable Theater, The Princess and the Pea, and Babes in Toyland.
The Center is particularly proud of its interactive educational experiences, These include pre-performance, hands-on art tables led by creative educator Chris Furtado, and last year's UC Berkeley Lawrence Hall of Science festivals The Art of Math and Dinosaurs and Their Young.
We believe the arts should be accessible for families. Tickets to Children's Performing Arts Program productions are affordably priced ($6 to $10) to encourage attendance by school groups and local families. The LBC also offers discount tickets ($2) for those students who receive assistance through the schools' free lunch program. Additionally, the LBC provides a free chaperone ticket for an adult with every ten ticketed children. In 1998, the LBC projects that 7,300 children will receive the $21 scholarship tickets and 1,460 free chaperone tickets will be distributed.
Now in its seventh year, LBC's ArtReach program provides children, teens and caregivers from culturally under-served communities and limited income families with opportunities to attend Children's Performing Arts Program performances and other LBC events free-of-charge. It is anticipated that more than 3,000 children and teens will attend LBC Children's Performing Program performances in the current year through the ArtReach program.
The LBC’s Artists in the Schools outreach program, established in 1993, is a free-of-charge program that supplements preschool through twelfth grade curricula at geographically and culturally diverse school sites in the Sonoma County area. Bringing regional and nationally recognized performing artists into school gyms and cafeterias, Artists in the Schools provides the opportunity for students to experience live arts performances including dance, music, theater, literature-based activities and puppetry.
By taking the arts directly into the schools, the LBC's outreach program allows school communities to share a common arts-related experience. Such outreach performances also offer students an appreciation for the arts as well as a better understanding of the world around them. Unlike television viewing, the audience participates directly with the performing artists, creating an interactive experience. All LBC family, school, and outreach performances are meant to entertain, educate and inspire!
Artists in the Schools currently serve over 9,000 students at 32 school sites in Sonoma County and beyond.
The Sonoma Museum of Visual Art delights in generating community interaction with contemporary art. Sonoma Museum of Visual Art hosts many events and exhibitions that are designed to expand visual arts awareness in Sonoma County. Informed thought and discussion contributes greatly to our community's arts literacy. Many Sonoma County school children have their first museum visit at the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art during a school tour. Volunteer docents, including retired people, stay-at-home parents, students and career people learn about art as they participate in the docent program.
The key organ of communication for the museum is our newsletter called ArtMuse. Many community members have hailed Artmuse as a super little newsletter. Unassuming in its looks, it is full of pith. For each issue, a professional arts writer is engaged to review the current exhibitions at Sonoma Museum of Visual Art. In addition to a professional writer, a museum docent writes an article about the current exhibition for each issue. For many docents, the Artmuse article is the first article about art that they have ever written and on several occasions, the docent writings have been every bit as astute and well written as the professional review. Many additional volunteers write other articles that come and go in the newsletter, creating a kind of nexus of communication for the museum's community.