Exploring Art Through Family Learning at BDAC

A work of art can invite us to slow down, notice something unfamiliar, or consider an idea from another person’s perspective. Making art gives us another way to enter that conversation. At Bountiful Davis Art Center, Family Art Night brings these experiences together, connecting the work in our galleries with opportunities for our community to explore, experiment, and create.

Family Art Night is free, with all supplies provided. That access is central to the program’s purpose. We want families to encounter meaningful artwork and participate in creative learning regardless of income, background, or previous experience. Whether someone visits galleries regularly or is walking into an art center for the first time, there is a place for them at the table.

Our 2025–2028 Strategic Plan identifies “creative access across generations” as a core value and calls for exhibition themes to inform educational programming. Family Art Night puts that commitment into practice. The artists we exhibit help shape what we explore together, offering a connection between professional artistic practice and the creative decisions participants make in their own work.

This approach begins with looking. What materials has an artist chosen? How do color, texture, and composition influence what we notice? What might change if the same idea were expressed in a different medium? These questions offer an approachable entry point into contemporary art while leaving room for deeper engagement. Participants can begin with something visible—a line, a surface, a familiar shape—and follow their curiosity from there.

Bianca Velasquez’s exhibition Survival Instincts offered one such starting point. Her intricate beadwork and large-scale abstract imagery drew on insects and survival to explore experiences of grief, joy, growth, and decay. The work invited close attention to the relationship between imagery and materials, and to the expressive possibilities of small details within a larger composition.

For the related Family Art Night, families explored the galleries and received a brief introduction to the artist before beginning their own work. Using squeegees, participants pulled acrylic paint across canvas boards to create colorful backgrounds, then added beads to develop insect compositions. The project brought several artistic decisions into focus: how colors interact, how a background supports an image, and how dimensional materials change a surface.

Through those choices, families could explore aspects of Velasquez’s practice while developing their own responses. Beads became a way to consider pattern, texture, and form. The exhibition provided a shared reference, while each participant had room to make something individual.

Our September Family Art Night takes inspiration from Eli Kerns’s Wild Rose, a drawing made with colored pencil, Kitakata paper, and wax. Branches, thorns, and rose hips emerge through the waxed surface, inviting viewers to look closely at details that appear with different degrees of clarity. The materials are part of how the image unfolds.

Working with wax and rice paper, participants will explore texture, layering, and translucency—the way light passes through a material. This offers a practical introduction to the relationship between an image and the surface that carries it. Experimenting with materials can also prompt a return to the original artwork with fresh questions and a greater appreciation for the artist’s decisions.

Across these experiences, our aim is to make space for observation, experimentation, and individual expression. Children and adults can work alongside one another, compare discoveries, and approach unfamiliar materials together. There is value in trying something, adjusting it, and seeing where an idea leads.

This is where artistic excellence and inclusion meet. Thoughtfully presented exhibitions give our community access to the ideas and practices of living artists. Connected educational programs create opportunities to engage with that work through conversation and personal experience. Together, they help make BDAC a place where artists and audiences can create, reflect, and belong.