Youth Art Expo 2025:
Architecture & Imagination

Youth Art Expo is an anchor Education program of the Museum that invites K-12 students across the extended Roaring Fork Valley to engage their creativity and problem-solving skills through an artist-designed curriculum around a single theme. The 2025 edition is Architecture and Imagination, with a curriculum designed by artist Madelon Vriesendorp, multidisciplinary artist Charlie Koolhaas, and designer, educator, and nonprofit leader Maya Bird-Murphy. Students are invited to design spaces, buildings, or cities in response to creative prompts and with no assigned limits. The Museum provides participants with materials and other resources, as well as exhibition space to share their ideas with each other and the wider community.

Students will respond to the prompts: how can architecture be reimagined? What can you create with the resources around you? This edition of Youth Art Expo also personalizes prompts based on student interests. In response, students will repurpose often overlooked materials, fashioning them into spectacular structures and environments. Designs will range from treehouses, to community spaces, to creative interpretations of the concept of home or shelter, and will take on myriad forms, from building the highest popsicle stick tower imaginable, or cultivating a tropical garden using cardboard boxes. Student projects will unfold as drawings, models, design objects, and interactive human-scale structures to climb into or observe.

This biennial program is led by an educational philosophy that purports that a good art assignment is itself a work of art. To that end, each edition of Youth Art Expo brings together a cohort of international and local artists and practitioners to design curricula around a single theme and work directly with local students on all stages of making. The artists work with the museum Education team to develop lesson plans, instructional videos, and workshops that focus on creative problem solving. The museum provides these artist-designed curricula to educators and institutions across the region as an easily scalable educational experience. All schools and students in the extended Roaring Fork Valley, including homeschool and alternative education students, are encouraged to participate.