Resource Center

Do you want to have your own conversation about the arts? Download the viewing guide and gather your friends and colleagues. Or learn more about how to bring arts programming into your home or organization through the links below. Listed are just a handful of the organizations actively working in their communities and providing resources and tools to help others do the same.

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Meet the Experts

Americans for the Arts was founded in 1960 and is the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts and arts education. From offices in Washington, DC and New York City, they provide a rich array of programs that meet the needs of over 150,000 members and stakeholders. Americans for the Arts are dedicated to representing and serving local communities and to creating opportunities for every American to participate in and appreciate all forms of the arts.

The Levine School of Music is the Washington DC region’s preeminent center for music education. Levine provides a welcoming community where children and adults find lifelong inspiration and joy through learning, performing, listening to, and participating with others in music. Levine’s distinguished faculty offers a broad and well-rounded curriculum to provide a strong musical foundation for students of different ages, abilities, and interests. In an effort to make a Levine education available to everyone, hundreds of Levine students receive substantial scholarship assistance and many hundreds more receive free instruction through outreach programs.

Meet Me: Making Art Accessible to People with Dementia provides a comprehensive framework for creating art programs for individuals with dementia and their caregivers. Developed out of the Museum of Modern Art’s educational programs, this publication serves as a resource for museum and care-organization professionals, as well as for professional and family caregivers.

Music & Memory is a non-profit organization that brings personalized music into the lives of the elderly or infirm through digital music technology, vastly improving quality of life.

The National Center for Creative Aging (NCCA) was founded in 2001 and is dedicated to fostering an understanding of the vital relationship between creative expression and healthy aging and to developing programs that build on this understanding. The arts can serve as a powerful way to engage elders in a creative and healing process of self-expression, enabling them to create works that honor their life experience.

The National Guild for Community Arts Education, founded in 1937, supports and advances access to lifelong learning opportunities in the arts. They foster the creation and development of community arts education organizations by providing research and information resources, professional development, networking opportunities and funding, and by advocating on behalf of the field.

Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections is a free resource for teachers interested in the brain and learning, in relation to emotions, arts and creativity. Exciting new developments in the field of neuroscience are leading to a new understanding of how the brain works that is beginning to transform how we teach in the classroom. Teachers are aware of these developments and are hungry for information that they can apply to their practice. One of the central goals of Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections is to help teachers learn to use research to create their own solutions to their particular classroom challenges. Another important goal is to provide new and useful metaphors that we all can use to describe teaching and learning and that are grounded in modern neuroscience. Through this course, teachers learn to think critically about the field of Mind, Brain, and Education and thus learn to be informed consumers of information about brain science, better able to separate science from myth and misinterpretation.

The Psychiatry Partial Hospital Program (PPH) offered through the Minneapolis VA Health Care System is a program that serves veterans with a variety of mental health issues such as suicide, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, posttraumatic stress disorder and substance abuse. In PPH, the Creative Arts Therapist works toward patient goals as part of the interdisciplinary team.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical facilities use the creative arts nationwide as one form of rehabilitative treatment to help Veterans recover from and cope with physical and emotional disabilities. Across the country each year, Veterans treated at VA facilities compete in a local creative arts competition. To learn more about creative arts programs for veterans in your community, please contact your local Veterans Affairs group.

TCMOCA Artist-in-Residence Program (A.I.R.) at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital This arts in health program brought artists from the University of Minnesota to the Fairview Hospital System to create art with children in cancer treatment. This program also served caregivers, family members, and the community. The first Artist-in-Residence started in September of 2012. Contact your local hospital to see if they offer similar programs.

Get Lit is Los Angeles’ leading nonprofit presenter of literary performance, education, and teen poetry programs. Many of Get Lit’s primary programs are based on Get Lit’s “immensely effective” standards based in-school curriculum. Get Lit is dedicated to improving literacy rates by bringing their programs into as many schools throughout the nation as they can and have created an “Adopt-A-School” campaign model to allow schools to receive free instruction on the curriculum and change the lives of hundreds of their students.

Site Credits

Interactive Manager: Richard Morgan
Interactive Producer: Heidi Van Heel
Interactive Coordinator: Jessi Foell
Managing Producer: Ted Hinck
Web Production Assistant: Melissa Block
Vice President Interactive Media: John Daenzer
Educational Materials developed by: Twin Cities Public Television

Special thanks to:

Nicola Demonte
Lynnea Forness
Maria Genné

Arts & the Mind is a production of TPT National Productions and Eaton Creative. Leo Eaton is writer/producer/director. Editor: Barbara Ballow. Executive Producer: Gerry Richman.

Funding for Arts & the Mind is provided by MetLife Foundation.

This website was informed by sources in Twin Cities Public Television’s Public Insight Network®.