Children’s Discovery Museum gets NEA grant to aid pandemic recovery

Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose is set to receive a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) through the American Rescue Plan, created to help the arts and cultural sector recover from the pandemic.

This is the first award from the NEA for the museum, which will use the funding to restore an arts specialist position for the museum’s performing and visual arts programs for young children.

“Young children have suffered during this pandemic, and the arts offer youngsters a way to make sense of the world by expressing themselves through their own innate creativity,” Marilee Jennings, the museum’s executive director, said in a statement. “I’m thrilled that this award will help us rebuild our visual and performing arts for our littlest artists back to where the programs were before the pandemic.”

NEA chair Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson said the grant funding will help the museum and other arts organizations rebuild and reopen.

“Our nation’s arts sector has been among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Jackson added. “The arts are crucial in helping America’s communities heal, unite and inspire, as well as essential to our nation’s economic recovery.”

The museum uses a three-prong approach in its visual and performing arts programming:

Young children observe professional artists, witness the work of their peers and are invited to participate in art-making themselves. The programming reflects the local multicultural community and also introduces children to traditional art forms like professional ballet, opera, and Broadway musicals. Visual art programming includes painting, sculpting, drawing and working with clay.