ACNY Believes
Art Connects. Everyone has the capacity to respond to artwork. As Kojiro Tomita, curatorat the Boston Museum of Art has said, ". . . art is a tryst, where the joy of its maker and beholder meet.”

Art Heals, enabling us to have experiences we can have from no other source.  As a client of International Center for the Disabled noted:  “Before I go into the physical therapy gym, I wheel down the corridor past this beautiful [art]work—and I enter the gym in a different frame of mind that helps me cope a little better with treatment.”

Art Helps Us Think. John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design notes that though math and the sciences teach us the way to a single correct answer, art teaches us to be open to multiple perspectives and interpretations.

Art Transforms. Art theorist John Dewey notes that art has the ability to “. . . modify our habitual ways of thinking, feeling and perceiving.”  A resident at an ACNY recipient agency noted that simply walking by one particular painting every day  made him a little less angry with life, putting him in a better frame of mind to face his world.

Art Builds Community. Ismael Ahmed, director of Michigan’s Department of Human Services noted that “the arts can play a role in bringing out what makes people proud of themselves, their lives, their ethnicities, their history.”