On a brisk February morning, two student interns from the MSU Broad Art Museum slipped into a second-grade classroom at Lansing’s Post Oak Academy, carrying a plastic bin of paint sticks and a stack of circular wood panels.
A minute before, the kids were quietly engrossed in online research.
The screens went dark and the kids lit up.
“We missed you!” one student cried.
Interns Cate Havern and Lindsi Miller were there to bug the classroom — literally.
The class was studying insects and their habitats, setting the stage for a perfect mash-up of science and art.
Havern asked the kids if they recalled visiting the Broad the previous fall. An image of the steel-clad museum appeared on the screen behind her.
“Yeah, it’s a big triangle!” cried one student, obviously a budding architecture expert.
“We saw the flowers on the floor,” added another, referring to an intricate art installation by Esmaa Mohamoud.
The workshops at Post Oak, a public elementary school, and the reciprocal field trip to the Broad were part of an ambitious program supported by the Park West Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Park West Gallery in Southfield, Michigan.
So far, the program has served more than 16,000 students in mid-Michigan K-12 schools with widely varying levels of support for art education, including some that have none at all. At the same time, the program has enabled Michigan State University students to rack up 4,500 teaching hours at more than 50 schools.
The energy and engagement in the room vividly demonstrated that art is not a frivolous add-on to the curriculum. Art connects the brain, hands and spirit in profound ways no passive lesson can match.
The interns and Post Oak teacher Kayla Gamache cheered the kids on as they filled their wooden circles with ladybugs, mantises, butterflies and other tiny wonders.
It turns out that learning about insects, caring about their habitat and bringing them to life with a “super awesome paint stick” (in Havern’s words) are pretty much the same thing.
As the kids worked on their art, fantastic facts popped out of them.
“Metamorphosis is when something goes through a change and it just keeps going,” second grader Charleigh Berry declared.
Another student, Nora Clark, proudly listed the natural wonders she painted into her circle.
“There’s a ladybug, a cloud, two trees, two bushes and the underground,” she explained.
About 45 seconds later, she jumped back up to show a fresh blue smudge.
“I put some water underground.”
Curiosity and wonderment are like an infinite aquifer, ready to be tapped. You could see the sponge-like minds in the room undergo metamorphosis by the minute.
Color and light
Teachers and parents are deeply worried about the changing world that today’s kids face. Each day brings new warnings of depression, screen addiction, social media entanglement, inability to focus and low achievement.
Spend an hour watching kids dive into an art project, or soak up the art at the Broad, and the significance of the Park West program comes into dramatic focus.
“There’s so much stress in the world. Kids are feeling the stress in a different way,” explained Meghan Collins, museum educator of K-12 and family programs at the MSU Broad. “To be able to slow down, express some creativity, use imagination — if the world is going to keep going this way, I feel like those things are so important.”
Collins, a graduate of MSU’s art education program, was named Museum Educator of the Year by the Michigan Art Education Association in 2025. She helps a rotating crew of student interns design and conduct the workshops and goes with them into the schools.
The classes are carefully keyed to the different developmental stages and interests of kids from pre-school to high school, but they share a common spirit and goal.
“Having something physical to do that’s not on a screen, actual tactile engagement — that is a huge thing,” Collins said. “Many kids have a different sensory experience most of the day. Working with art materials is highly engaging.”
Unlike math or science, art is a realm with many (or no) right answers. To run with the insect metaphor, the Post Oak students pollinated and cross-fertilized each other’s work with a collegiality and camaraderie that was a joy to behold.
Endless varieties of experience, thought and creative activity make art education uniquely valuable, in Meghan Collins’ estimation.
“In a lot of the things they’re doing, there might only be one answer, because it might be really important that everyone knows that thing,” Collins said. “In this case, it’s important to learn that everyone sees the world differently.”
Not only did the kids pick different bugs to paint; some wrote facts about bugs; others painted habitats; others found alternate approaches.
In recent years, many local districts, including Lansing schools, have re-introduced art education after severe cuts in the past two decades. Some districts have an art teacher in one or more schools; others have irregular arts nights or other art-centered events; others give little or no attention to art.
“There is a disparity in the quality of arts education happening in different areas,” Collins said. “But when we engage with a school, we’re bringing something unique, no matter what kind of arts program they do have.”
One unique resource no school has is the Broad Museum itself. A recent exhibit of abstract paintings by Samia Halaby, an internationally acclaimed artist who got her master’s degree at MSU, was so rich in colorful stimuli it was hard for the kids to know where to look — or dance — first.
The kids partnered up by twos, picked different sections of a very long, tilted painting called “Centers of Energy” and danced the whole panorama as a group.
“We did that with all ages, from the youngest kids all the way up through our college kids, and it was so much fun,” Collins said. “Just reading the label is one way to learn, but there are so many ways to experience an art work.”
When the Post Oak group visited the Broad in October, the MSU interns wowed them with a wild variety of art, from Mohamoud’s installation of 6,000 die-cut steel Monarch butterflies to the paintings, sculptures, ceramic Chinese tiger pillows, ancient artifacts and other riches of the historic collection housed in the CORE gallery in the museum’s lower level.
The kids asked questions, gave their own interpretations, lingered, basked, rang the chimes and smelled the smells at the sensory stations. Of course, they also danced, inspired this time by breakdance-themed art from the 2025 MFA exhibit.
The synergy between the two components of the program is simple yet strong. Museum field trips show the kids what art can do. In classroom workshops, they do it.
“We told them that artists make art about what they think about,” Collins said.
A few weeks after the visit to the Broad, the interns visited Post Oak and flipped the script, asking them, “What are you thinking about?”
Primed by the art they’d seen at the Broad, they created sculptures out of wire, foam, cardboard, textured papers and other fun stuff — everything from see-through masks to a delicately decorated purse.
In February, Collins called Post Oak’s Gamache and offered to make a second visit, this time keyed to the current lessons on insects and their habitats.
“The first visit, we were focused on the kids and their ideas, but if we can help teachers make bigger connections to the curriculum, that’s even better,” Collins said.
There was still plenty of room for creative expression.
Second grader Liam Michoacán proudly held up a painting with two monarch butterflies and three chrysalides.
His mother, Sandra Figueroa, was observing the workshop. Her son was the quiet type, but she was happy to explain that Liam had a special connection to the Monarchs. His father came from the tiny region of Mexico where the Monarchs gather each year.
When a student looked worried, wondering what to paint, teacher Kayla Gamache or one of the interns sat down next to them and offered encouragement.
“In art, there’s no right or wrong,” Gamache told the students. “It doesn’t matter if you mess up a little bit.”
She took delight in every insight, every fact, every fancy her students put into the images.
“This is so cool!” she encouraged them.
At a workshop last year, a girl pulled out a drawing of a dragon from her desk and showed it to Collins. The girl was disappointed that some green color dripped onto the paper.
“Maybe there’s a special reason for the green,” Collins prompted her.
The girl lit up.
“It shoots slime!” she said.
The MSU interns bring the same spirit of enthusiasm and fun to every workshop, while suiting each task to the age and interests of the students.
In a recent pre-school session at the MSU Child Development Lab, Broad interns gave a group of four-year-olds the same wooden panels and paint sticks they used in the Post Oak insect project, but only talked about colors and paint.
“Some kids are in the drawing phase, where they’re making a picture that shows something, and some kids are just coloring,” Collins said.
Mostly, the kids lit up trying different color combinations.
“What if you put purple on top of that?”
“Put red and green together and make brown!”
The variations in the art were striking. One preschooler spent the entire session painstakingly coloring every square millimeter of her circle red, red, red.
Another one painted a whole solar system, with energy moving through it, and provided the intern with a verbal backstory.
Older students engage with the art, and create it, in more complex ways. Last year, a workshop at Holt Junior High was inspired by Mohamoud’s immersive sculptures at the Broad.
“Her artwork was so much about the space, and the way the light interacted with the sculpture,” Collins said. “So, we gave them a box, and a light, and sculpture material.”
The middle schoolers came up with all kinds of magic boxes. One student asked if they could turn off the lights, and they worked in the dark, with only the art works to see from.
Sponges, meet basketballs
Confronted with the ambiguities of contemporary art, adults often retreat to the false shelter of scorn.
Kids know better.
“Resistance Training,” a sports-themed 2024 exhibit at the Broad, featured a wall of partially deflated basketballs gathered from ditches, driveways and neighborhood courts by Detroit sculptor Tyrell Winston.
“Kids are ready for contemporary art,” Collins said. “They come across an interesting or strange object, like the basketball piece — they’re curious. They ask some great questions. ‘Are those real basketballs or did they try to make them look like basketballs? Why did the artist use them?’ Little kids are asking these questions. They know the artist made them for a reason.”
To prime the kids’ imaginations, the interns asked them to pick one basketball, imagine where it may have been found and what “life” it had before it ended up on the wall. Later, in the classroom workshops, they gathered found objects and invented stories to go with them.
“Kids often see things adults don’t,” Collins said. “They use expressions and metaphors that surprise you.”
Mohamoud’s die-cut field of dandelions inspired an outburst of stories and comments.
“It’s like a place I’ve never been that I want to go to,” one student said.
Young children are wide open to experiencing and making art, and that is one of the reasons Park West Foundation director Diane Pandolfi spearheaded the foundation’s support of programs at the MSU Broad.
Pandolfi, an educator for 44 years, compared kids to “sponges.”
“We all become jaded,” Pandolfi said. “Little kids are open to everything. They ask questions. They don’t judge. We don’t become judges until the middle years. Then we judge everything. We decide there’s bad art, bad hair, bad clothes.”
The philanthropic arm of Southfield-based Park West Gallery has supported the Broad’s art education programs for six years. From 2019 to 2022, the foundation gave the Broad $30,000 each year.
Pandolfi and her staff were so impressed with the program’s success, even during the pandemic’s online exile, that the amount of support was tripled, to $90,000 a year for each of the following three years.
The two parties are working how to make the arrangement more lasting and, possibly, permanent.
“You very rarely have such a rich, successful and effective partnership in education,” Pandolfi said.
Ten years ago, Pandolfi retired from a 40-year career in education in New Jersey, as a teacher and school principal.
The retirement didn’t last long. At Pandolfi’s goodbye party in 2015, her brother, Park West gallery CEO, co-founder (and former NASA engineer) Albert Scaglione, asked her to head up the foundation.
The foundation runs a variety of programs, from bringing big-name art by the likes of Picasso, Goya and Dali to smaller museums at no charge to supporting activities and material needs for kids that have aged out of foster care.
But the art education programs have a special meaning for her.
“As a 44-year educator, I believe that art and music are the heart and soul of any educational program,” Pandolfi said. “You’ve got to learn math, English, science and other stuff, but the arts are different. It’s what really makes us human.”
The hookup between the MSU Broad and Park West was far from inevitable. Six years ago, Sandra Brown, the Broad’s associate director of development for cultural arts, was looking for ways to put the museum’s educational programs on a firmer footing.
Brown reached out to colleague Tracey Zambeck, the MSU development arm’s regional director of major gifts for Southeast Michigan, for help with and leads on potential supporters.
“Tracey opened up alumni yearbooks and found my brother’s name as founder and CEO of Park West Gallery,” Pandolfi said. He had earned an MSU graduate degree in mechanical engineering.
Zambeck couldn’t get the globe-trotting gallery owner on the phone, but she was undeterred.
“She drove to Southfield to get an audience with my brother,” Pandolfi said with admiration. “She still couldn’t get through.” The foundation’s communications director, John Lichtenberg, finally collared Pandolfi.
“He told me this lady came in off the street, looking for a grant to educate kids about art, and I thought that was great,” Pandolfi said. They set up a conference call with Brown and got the program started.
Pandolfi hopes the Park West initiative at the Broad will keep growing and touch every school in the region, urban, suburban or rural.
“Everybody should at least be exposed to art,” she said. “It’s the lack of access, of exposure, that makes people uncomfortable. You might love it. You might even make it your profession.”
Collins sees the program as a golden opportunity to extend MSU’s educational mission and support local school districts struggling to keep all the curricular balls in the air.
She likened the Broad program to the Wharton Center’s “Take It From the Top,” an ambitious slate of workshops and classes that link local students from second grade to high school with Broadway professionals to learn the fundamentals of acting, singing and dancing and the nuts and bolts of musical theater.
“We just want to be a part of the arts ecosystem here, and make sure everybody is finding opportunities to engage with art, and make art,” Collins said.
The student interns are a key part of that ecosystem. The skills they develop while working with students will serve them for many years as they pursue careers in education, social work and other professions.
Intern Cate Havern, who is majoring in elementary education, learned about the Broad program through a professor and joined last fall.
“It’s exciting and heartwarming to bring art to schools that don’t have art programs,” she said. “The students are so hands on, so into it.”
Intern Lindsi Miller, who is majoring in social work, also started last fall.
“It’s so much more of a diverse experience than I was expecting,” Miller said. “I had no idea I was going to be visiting classrooms and making art with kids.”
Many of the program’s benefits are intangible, but not all of them. Along the way, Havern and Miller have helped hundreds of works of art come into being.
“We’ve done clay sculptures, boxes with lights in them, so many different things,” Havern said.
She relishes the possibility that in the year 2085, a 70-year-old former Post Oak student will dust off a clay sculpture, a light box or a painting of a bug found on a basement shelf and feel a fresh rush of art adrenaline.
“It’s so amazing to see the artworks the kids come up with,” Havern said. “It’s fun to imagine whether they’ll be intact years from now.”
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