The beautiful heritage building located in downtown Salmon Arm has been the home to SAGA Public Art Gallery for 11 years. In 2004, with the help of the Shuswap Community Foundation, who donated funds for us to build our Art Cart, we began a program designed to bring in more young families to experience the gallery. Many museums and art galleries across Canada are creating informal kids programming, exposing kids to music, art, theatre and history in an enjoyable way outside of the classroom.

Photo by Tracy Kutschker

In some ways, parents of young children are a little fearful of bringing them into the gallery. Images of a four-year old knocking over a marble sculpture enter the minds of many art-supportive parents. At SAGA, we want to be able to show people that children of all ages are welcome here and that an art gallery can be a fun place to hang out. With this in mind, we designed a Family Saturdays program after the successful Family Sundays at the Kelowna Art Gallery. It is a free, drop-in art making program for families with children of all ages, who come in and create an art project based on the theme of the current exhibition. Our young facilitators are very enthusiastic about teaching art to children. Projects have included book-making, collages, watercolour painting, treasure-box construction, paper lanterns, fibre-arts projects and much more. Our attendance has ranged from a quiet group of 3 to a rowsing group of 27.

"This is fun," said one little girl recently, "because I can paint my mommy however I want to. See, here is her nose and eyes, and here is the forest," pointing to her mom's hair. Some artists spend years trying to recapture the freedom found in children's art. This project has even given the gallery a fresh new energy!

Thanks to community members donating various art supplies, and to Opus for the fantastic donation of paper, crayons, paints, brushes and more, we are well stocked for many different projects.

Family Saturdays runs every Saturday at SAGA from 2:00pm to 4:00pm. No pre-registration is required, just a desire to have fun and make art. Check out SAGA's website at www.sagapublicartgallery.ca and click on Family Saturdays.

Special feature by guest contributor Tracy Kutschker