LACMALab Manifesto To quote the poet William Butler Yeats, "Education is not filling the pail: It is lighting the fire." It is important to foster visual literacy at a time when visual stimuli increasingly dominate experience. Contemporary art, design, and media offer compelling and useful ways to dissect, understand, and connect with the world. Play, the forerunner of culture, is the laboratory in which the imaginary and the everyday are invoked, explored, and transformed. Creativity is not, by any means, the exclusive province of art. There is great value, however, in art experiences that are self-defined, flexible, and engaging. Such experiences become translatable and transportable to other areas of life. Art making demonstrates the profound idea that each of us has the power to take a concept or a vision and give it concrete form in the world. Creativity builds self-esteem, a necessary ingredient for success. Viewers are stimulated by environments open to discovery. LACMALab is committed to raising questions about and eliciting responses to visual experience. Instruction through closed hierarchical systems that use control and intimidation shuts down thinking or produces boredom. Understanding and participating in the art-making process heightens the capacity for critical thinking, problem solving, risk taking, and managing ambiguity and paradox. Children learn best through art experiences that engage them along with their parents, teachers, and other adults in their lives. Museums are public spaces that should speak simultaneously to multiple generations. Varied learning styles and the intuitive function of emotional intelligence can be acknowledged and embraced through meaningful experiences with art and art making. Artists, curators, and designers are resources for new models of learning and act as vital forces in the construction of culture. In the future, museums will need to reimagine their relationships to art, artists, and audience. LACMALab strives to be in the forefront of that development.