Kids Dream In Color

"Kids Dream in Color" an intensive workshop series with Visual Artist and Youth Mentor Lichiban.

"Kids Dream in Color," or KDIC for short, is a part of VONY's Creative Expression Workshop series which is designed to expose students ages 8-14 to the arts and to develop their imagination skills and use it as a tool to develop communication skills and confidence in expressing ideas and feelings. Classes are intended to be fun and to encourage positive attitudes, team building and self-expression.

A view of a workshop is shown below:

"The Empire State Building of the Future"


This short documentary of a KDIC workshop chronicles a group of young students participating in a program that gave them the task of re-imagining the iconic Empire State building. The film follows the young artists as they visit the structure for inspiration, are guided in a visualization process, and mentored by professional artists to finally bring their creation to life. In creating their own versions of the building, they incorporated information they learned about environmental design, but most importantly, they included elements of themselves in a revealing way. The kids finally present their work on the final day, closing the chapter- but not the book, on a very fun and unique artistic experience. Interviews with the children, mentors, and parents provide the unique perspectives of each of those involved and affected by the program. It enabled the exploration of the capabilities of the kids' imagination and showed how they applied it to the task while staying interactive and having fun.

This workshop, keeping up with KDIC's goal of creative expression, offers but a glimpse of the kinds of project, kids will undertake in this program and the effects it can bring to their thinking and work.