The High Museum of Art in Atlanta announces that more than 75,000 students have seen or are scheduled to visit the current “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters” exhibition, a record for the institution. Of those students, 43,000 will visit as part of the Museum’s Art Access program, which allows free admission and bus travel for students at Title I schools. In January the High broadened the reach of the Art Access program, allowing any Title I school in the state to participate. Since that announcement, 23,000 students from 174 schools were booked to visit the High from 51 of the surrounding counties in Georgia.
“The High’s Art Access program serves such an important purpose as an educational resource for the schools and students of Georgia,” said Patricia Rodewald, the High’s Eleanor McDonald Storza Director of Education. “The response that we have received from the Title I schools in our community to take advantage of our offer to see ‘Picasso to Warhol’ free of charge shows the great need for arts education in our community schools. We take great pride in providing this learning experience to students and hope that others will follow suit in supporting this initiative.”
“Picasso to Warhol,” an unprecedented exhibition of 129 masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), will be on view until April 29, 2012. In addition to presenting masterpieces from MoMA’s collection, the exhibition provides an introduction to 14 of the most important artists of the 20th century, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, and presents information about the most important artistic developments of the modern age.
Art Access
Art Access is an all-inclusive field trip program for students that offers free admission, transportation (if required) and “Welcome Back” cards that allow each child to return to the Museum with his or her family one time, free of charge. The Art Access program was created in 2004 with the goal of removing all economic barriers to visiting the High for more than 15,000 public school students each year. The program also aims to concentrate on high-risk schools or districts where arts education funding has been cut most dramatically, or where there is persistent under-funding of arts education. Of Art Access applications for the 2011–2012 school years, 87% have come from Title I schools. Free admission is made available through the Art Access program, which has welcomed more than 125,000 participants since its inception.
Sponsorship and funding
The Kendeda Fund has provided not only operating support but also funding for an endowment challenge grant to make Art Access a permanent program at the High Museum of Art. Additional support for the Art Access “I See Literacy” and “I See History” permanent collection tours is provided by the Vera A. Milner Memorial Endowment for Children Education. Anyone wishing to provide additional busing funds can do so with a donation of $500, which will bring approximately 50 students to the Museum.
High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. With more than 12,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American and decorative art; significant holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art. The High’s media arts department produces acclaimed annual film series and festivals of foreign, independent and classic cinema. In November 2005 the High opened three new buildings by architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the Museum’s size, creating a vibrant “village for the arts” at the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta. For more information about the High, please visit www.High.org