Art Daze is The Aldrich Museum’s summer program for children aged four to twelve. When the program started eleven years ago, it was offered as an afternoon program for children seven to twelve years old. In 2005, the program grew to include a morning session for four- to six-year-olds, offering even our youngest visitors the opportunity to work directly with artists and to experience contemporary art first hand. Every week, for six weeks, contemporary artists lead innovative hands-on Art Daze workshops based on the processes, ideas, and materials they explore in their own work.

Art Daze also furthers an important partnership The Aldrich has developed with ESCAPE to the Arts, a program of the Regional YMCA of Western Connecticut, which serves youth in neighboring Danbury, CT. The partnership with ESCAPE began in 1995 when we brought ten students to the Museum for a weekly sculpture class in our Sculpture Garden. Every year since then, we have offered a limited number of scholarships to enable ESCAPE students to take part in Art Daze.

Taking advantage of The Aldrich’s versatile dedicated Education Center, Art Daze participants experiment with a variety of materials, as they learn how they too can develop their ideas from thought to artwork. The work on view is by the six artists teaching the sessions for seven to twelve year olds: Michael De Feo, Martin Kremer, Paulette Rosen, Kelly Becerra, Bruce Brosnan, and Stephanie Diamond.

Art Daze is made possible, in part, by The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Estate of Ruth I. Krauss, and Ridgefield Printing, Inc.

For more information, please call 203.438.4519 or visit www.aldrichart.org.