MIAMI, FL.-The Miami Art Museum announced today that it has received $10 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to fund the Knight School Education Program, an expanded educational program that will premiere at MAM’s new home in downtown Miami’s Museum Park. The Museum’s new 120,000-square-foot building designed by Herzog & de Meuron will open in 2011, allowing MAM to better serve diverse audiences and enhancing the Museum’s role as a bridge between continents and cultures.

“The Knight School Education Program will enable MAM to build on its many successful education programs and reach an estimated 40,000 school children across Miami-Dade County every year,” MAM Director Terence Riley said. “We are honored that the Knight Foundation has granted us $10 million as a program endowment as part of the Capital Campaign for our new building in Museum Park. Their support provides a solid future for our educational initiatives and furthers our shared goal of using the arts to transform our community.”

The grant to MAM is part of a larger Knight Foundation initiative supporting performing and visual arts programs throughout South Florida, which was announced Wednesday.

Alberto Ibargüen, CEO and president of Knight Foundation, said, "Our initiative aims to bond a diverse community through shared experiences in the arts. Bringing some 40,000 school children to MAM every year to share the gift of arts, in perpetuity, thanks to this new endowment, is a wonderful way of accomplishing this goal."

MAM now provides arts education for more children than any other private institution in Miami-Dade County. As MAM’s educational program grows into the larger new facility, the Knight School Education Program will provide an expanded educational program aimed at engaging even more Miami-Dade County students. The programs will evolve with students as they mature and connect the museum to the public school curriculum.

The Knight School Education Program will provide: • A visit to the new museum in Museum Park for every Elementary School student at least one time during their primary school years. An entire grade level will be reached each year with Museum programming through school visits, curriculum materials, or the results of a teacher training workshop. The specific grade, third or fifth, will be determined in consultation with the Miami-Dade School District. • An opportunity for every Junior High School student to visit the museum in Museum Park at least once during their middle school years. MAM will encourage middle school students (grades 6, 7 and 8) to visit the Museum with their families through free passes, curriculum materials for their teachers, and special programs targeted to their interests. • Intensive collaborative programs with three high schools to sponsor an indepth magnet or honors program focused on art, design and/or technology. One school will be added each of the first three years in MAM’s new facility. MAM will develop this program on the current magnet schools program. Students at the participating high schools will take an intensive course of study involving multiple visits to the Museum over the course of a school year.

While the new museum is being planned and built, MAM has developed several educational initiatives thematically tied to the construction of its new home in Museum Park as tools for engaging young people throughout Miami-Dade County in the museum and its programs.

Beginning this year, MAM will present Brick by Brick, an after-school program aimed at underserved teenagers, linking their home environment to the larger community and providing direct experience in fields such as architecture, computer graphics, geography, landscape design, mathematics and sociology. Participants in the two-year program, to be offered at the downtown YWCA, Little Havana Institute, Liberty City community center all girls’ group and Barnyard - Coconut Grove Cares, will examine and document their immediate neighborhoods in the first year of the program. The second year will introduce the role of architecture in creating community. Brick by Brick has been generously funded by the Heckscher Foundation for Children, New York, for its first two years.

In addition to Brick by Brick, MAM is partnering with Design and Architecture Senior High (DASH) in a new program to engage its senior architecture students in the process of MAM’s new museum facility. The construction process of the new museum will be used as an instructional laboratory. Students will meet at the site, the present museum facilities and other locations for the duration of the building project. School groups from throughout Miami-Dade County also are visiting MAM during the exhibition Work in Progress: Herzog and de Meuron’s Miami Art Museum (on view through April 6, 2008), which gives them an insider’s view into the design process behind the new museum.