Narratives of Innovations: Youth Art Exhibition

Goals We're going for

We wanted to go for the best non-technical solution.

Inspiration

We took a trip to the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in order to better understand the exhibits and the staff. We spoke directly with museum staff to learn about the problems that most needed solving, and which of our proposed solutions would be best for the museum. We had initially proposed developing a college internship program for the museum to increase youth engagement. Hearing past stories of interns failing to complete work without a designated deadline, in addition to feeling out the space, led us to begin imagining our internship program as an art show for students. The staff’s desire to encourage contributions from students, and their past experience with hosting artist exhibitions, further solidified our decision.

What it does

We have created a program dedicated to engaging youth in the surrounding Waltham area by inviting them to submit art based on minority perspectives discussed in the museum. This event is aimed at increasing awareness and engagement of young people with the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation. We also hope that the event will give the museum the opportunity to discuss unsung heroes of innovations, like female and PoC workers. The artists selected for this event will be put on display in the museum, with a special Opening Night event dedicated to the unveiling of the new art.

How we built it

We wrote out a project outline first, then researched grants that fit our project. We wrote a grant proposal and a sample artist application, based on the requirements for the grant and what we learned about the museum from visiting.

Challenges we ran into

The two largest challenges that we ran into was finding a grant and making the project fit the grant while still being realistic for us to do in the allotted time frame.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We researched and wrote most of a grant application. This involved lots of research into the museum and tedious writing so we are proud that we were able to put together a substantial draft that would actually prove useful to the museum.

What we learned

Through our project, we learned about the museum and what it means to put together a grant proposal. We also learned how to use multiple different sources to best optimize and streamline our solution for the museum.

What's next for Narratives of Innovations: Youth Art Exhibition

We hope that the museum likes our program and would be willing to try to implement it, in which case the next steps would be submitting our grant application and potentially applying for additional grants as well.

Built With

• google