The BMFA’s educational program, Through the Generations, provides a means for creating closer family connections and knowledge about family heritage via a range of art activities. Beginning in the summer of 2008, children and teens have experienced the pleasure and excitement of learning how art can relate to themselves and life around them.  Historic paintings from the Museum’s Permanent Collection served as an aesthetic springboard for this effort. These include artworks by the Museum’s founding members, Ruth McGonigle, Calla Lilly Magill, and Clara Lilly Ely, the group’s first president. Visiting artists from Mexico, a variety of American artists who came to the Rio Grande Valley during that time, and other contemporaries and colleagues from the 1920’s through the 1950s also have works in the collection. Young people are able to learn from paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints that captured the local cultural influences and growth during that formative era. The works are typically realistic depictions that document the landscape, architecture, seascape, and the local populace. Children and their parents are able to identify and relate to these subjects.

The Museum is launching a virtual exhibition of its collection so that even more people can enjoy and learn from these works. In order to further the understanding of this collection, oral histories about the artists and their work are being recorded for use with the exhibition. Through the Generations increases the public’s awareness of the Permanent Collection by making it accessible to a broader viewing audience.

Closer familial connections blossom as young people participating in the program conduct family interviews. Art activities based on the interviews and the Permanent Collection result in positive environmental and social ties, producing multiple benefits beyond the personal. 

The general community also benefits from this type of program. The local community has become more aware of the historic art works in the Museum’s collection and find pleasure in visiting them, while a virtual exhibition allows access by a broader, global audience. A second virtual exhibition, offered in Spanish and English, showcases the artwork by children and teens, instilling a sense of personal and family pride.  An accessible community program like this one can help reduce dropout rates and criminal behavior among at-risk youths.

This program is made possible through funding from the City of Brownsville, Meadows Foundation, Raul Tijerina Jr. Foundation, Strake Foundation, Texas Commission for the Arts, and Humanities Texas.