Why Don’t More Poor Kids Get to See Art?

In New York, a place whose cultural institutions attract people from around the world, there are residents who not only have never visited those institutions but also some who have never even been uptown.
“We have people living on the Lower East Side who have not taken the bus or the train,” says Brigitte Rivera, a family child specialist at University Settlement, a social services organization in Manhattan. This surprising problem—a simple transit hurdle—is just one of the many barriers that separate New York’s lower-income and immigrant populations from its renowned arts and cultural offerings.
As the executive director of Cool Culture, Candice Anderson thinks about how to lower such barriers for exactly the kind of clients that Rivera has. Founded in 1999, Cool Culture makes museums, botanical gardens and zoos accessible to families who have had limited exposure to these attractions. They do this in all sorts of ways: securing free admission to 90 different institutions, facilitating families’ first museum visits and training early educators to encourage arts education in their communities. Funding comes through a combination of individual, corporate and government support. “If you think about the history of museums in the U.S., they’ve been a rarified space,” says Anderson. “There’s a history of class divide, so people rarely think of them as educating the masses.” Continue reading “Why Don’t More Poor Kids Get to See Art?”