The Hood has a longstanding commitment to serving regional school and community audiences as well as Dartmouth students, faculty, alumni, and staff. Each year more than five thousand regional schoolchildren visit the museum to participate in tours and our multiple-visit programs. This map, produced as part of the Community Partners Mapping Project of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), illustrates the extent of the museum's outreach in Vermont and New Hampshire. It is based on the 126 community partners the museum worked with during the 2012–2013 academic year, including 86 K–12 schools (represented by blue dots), 18 colleges/universities (double black dots), 5 community organizations (orange diamonds), 4 senior groups (red squares), 4 cultural organizations (blue outlined diamonds), and 9 other organizations ranging from social service agencies to libraries (purple squares and green triangles). (Not all of the community partners were located in the bi-state area.) Note the blue dot located near the Canadian border; many schools transport their students significant distances and many hours by bus to visit the museum. With all the pressure schools face to fulfill curricular requirements, this signals how highly they value the opportunity for students to learn from original works of art.
This summer, the museum's reach is extending even further—all the way to Washington, D.C.—as part of another AAMD initiative called pARTners in Learning, an exhibition of student artwork at the Department of Education that highlights the results of museum programs in partnership with local schools. Sixteen college and university-based museums from across the country are exhibiting artworks made by Kindergarten through college students who participated in programs at their institutions. Designed to showcase the power of the arts in multi-generational, cross-curricular, and interdisciplinary museum programs implemented across the nation, the exhibition will be on display from July 1 through August 29.