Growing Up Creative: How Youth Art Shaped a Community and a Museum

On a summer afternoon in 2013, two young students lay on the Museum of Friends’ second-floor gallery floor, studying tadpoles suspended in clay vessels from the Water is Gold exhibition. Their task was simple: look closely and paint what they saw. But the quiet concentration on their faces, brows furrowed, hands steady, eyes fixed on the slow movement of the tadpoles. captured something deeper. It reflected a way of learning that has anchored the museum’s work with children for nearly two decades: attentive observation, creative risk-taking, and a growing awareness of the world around them.

Although the Museum of Friends (MoF) is known statewide for its contemporary collection and counterculture history, its longest-running impact in Huerfano County has unfolded quietly, through the hands of local children. Since 2008, the museum has become a place where students explore art, science, cultural history, and civic identity not through worksheets or lectures, but through touch, curiosity, and creative discovery. It started with a simple idea: give children real materials, real art, real stories and trust them to make something meaningful from it.

Brightening Downtown, One Planter Box at a Time

One of the earliest examples of this approach appeared along Main Street. From 2008 to 2023, the Downtown Beautification Planter Boxes Project invited children, teens, and older community members to paint wooden planter boxes that lined the downtown corridor. The project blended art-making with service learning: participants explored designs, color, and themes tied to nature, environmental care, and community pride.

Guided by artists and educators, students also engaged in adapted lessons on volunteerism, philanthropy, and civil society—drawn from the Council of Michigan Foundations’ K–12 Education and Philanthropy Project but reimagined for a rural Colorado context. For many children, this was their first introduction to the idea that art could support community well-being and that they had a role to play in shaping the places they lived.

The boxes did more than decorate sidewalks. They became small but powerful teaching tools—introducing young people to stewardship, collective responsibility, and the idea that creativity can transform public space. Years later, when the museum helped evolve the project into the Arts in Society–funded Planter Boxes for the Common Good, students could recognize that their early contributions had laid the foundation for a permanent, more expansive cultural installation along Main Street.

A Mural That Grew With Its Artists

That same spirit carried into the Positive Images Children’s Mural behind the museum. What began in 2009 as a small Friday afternoon activity soon became a multi-year collaboration involving AmeriCorps youth, Boy Scouts, families, and students from the Sangre de Cristo Youth Center. Children learned how to measure the wall using geometry, how to scale up drawings, how to mix colors, and how to collaborate across age groups and backgrounds. Each year brought new hands and new ideas, building a layered, evolving artwork that transformed a once-forgotten alley into a vibrant public corridor.

Hands-On Learning: The First School Tour

The museum’s educational work indoors began just as organically. In June 2008, Peakview Elementary School brought its kindergarten and first-grade students on MoF’s first-ever school tour. Teachers and museum staff guided them through explorations of shells, pinecones, seahorses, and even a giant sequoia cone before connecting those natural forms to artworks in the galleries. In small groups, each child sketched patterns or insects found in both nature and the museum’s collection. The activity became a moment of interdisciplinary learning with part science, part art, part storytelling. This is a model MoF continues to follow.

What Students Experience Today

Today’s school tours introduce students to a wide range of artworks and ideas. In the Museum of Friends’ galleries, they encounter pieces connected to the region’s creative roots, including works that reflect Southern Colorado’s experimental art communities and the legacy of places like Drop City. They also explore contemporary works across diverse media, paintings, mixed media, sculpture, and photography. All of which prompt questions about technique, color, perspective, and artistic intention.

Students often gravitate toward works tied to local history, such as depictions of historic churches, early Hispano families, and recognizable landscapes. These exhibitions create moments of personal connection and community pride, especially when students identify surnames, places, or stories familiar to their own families.

Rotating and traveling exhibitions introduce broader themes such as ecology, water, identity, and lived experience, often featuring local artists whose work is recognized across the region, the state, and the country, alongside nationally acclaimed artists whose perspectives deepen the learning experience.

Through sketching, guided discussion, and close observation, students learn to analyze what they see, compare artworks, and draw connections between artistic choices and the world around them. The experience encourages them to think critically, explore creatively, and understand how art reflects both individual lives and the wider community.

A Lasting Legacy

Across murals, planter boxes, gallery visits, and hands-on activities, MoF has cultivated a generation of youth who understand creativity as something active and participatory. Many of the children who painted the early boxes or contributed to the mural are now adults. Some live elsewhere; some have stayed; some return to revisit the spaces they helped create. Their influence remains visible throughout downtown and within the museum’s galleries. They helped shape the physical and cultural landscape of Walsenburg, proving that youth art is not an accessory to community life, but a driving force within it. And, at the Museum of Friends, the belief endures: when young people are invited to look closely, create boldly, and explore their community through art, they don’t just learn — they help build the world around them.