I’d like to share with you some news about several exciting changes that the Museum’s third floor classroom is about to undergo over the next two months. As many of you know, the Museum’s third floor classroom is one of the most widely used spaces in the building, serving needs in the School Tours, Teacher Training, hands/ON!, and Kids Open Art Studio programs, to name just a few.

The space, which has until recently never been named, will now be called the Nell J. Redfield Learning Center, thanks to the generous support of the Nell J. Redfield Foundation. When the Museum began to develop the programming and plans for the Center for Art + Environment in 2008, the Museum simultaneously began conversations with the Nell J. Redfield Foundation—which had generously supported the Nell J. Redfield Discovery Center in the Museum since the opening of the new facility in 2003—about the future of the Discovery Center. Thus, plans for the new Nell J. Redfield Learning Center on the Museum’s third floor began. As a result of these conversations, we now look forward to several exciting developments over the next sixty days about which I’d like to make Volunteers aware.

First, Will Bruder, the architect of the building, is designing a new entryway for the classroom. The current drywall and wooden door will be removed and replaced with a glass door and window wall in the hallway where the Learning Center is located. This delightful architectural change will showcase the Redfield Learning Center space to the Museum’s visitors, who will literally be able to see the learning that takes place in the Museum from multiple vantage points on the most highly trafficked floor in the Museum. Until this project was imagined, the learning that the Museum focuses so much attention and effort upon could not be seen in this very dynamic space because of the physical realities of the wall and door in the Learning Center. This architectural change will help to present the Museum’s focus on education in an exciting new way. Second, in the ongoing project to focus the mission and vision of the Museum’s library as a centerpiece of the Center for Art + Environment, all books currently in the Library collection related to education and art techniques will be migrated to new shelving that will be installed in the Nell J. Redfield Learning Center, creating a kind of satellite library for the Education department for use by teachers, students and families. Finally, the walls inside of the Learning Center will be treated with a material that will allow us to hang far more student art and educational materials than we have ever previously been able to. Once the three-day construction process is completed by late summer or early fall it will be possible to hang art projects created by students in the Museum’s most popular programs from floor to ceiling around the entire room, visible through the new glass door and wall. I hope that the changes I’ve described here sound as exciting to you as they are for me. I hope that you will also join me in celebrating the new look and feel of the Nell J. Redfield Learning Center in the coming months.