Visual art is more than a luxury. It has been highly important since the time of the cave dwellers as a means of communication. It came before the written word was invented. Art enhances our humanity as no other activity can. From the beginning of time, visual art, music, and dance have been a part of all cultures.

All the arts tell stories, whether it is in writing, painting, music, choreography, sculpture, or photography. The arts are a healthy activity for the producers, observers, readers, and listeners. It is the creativity of humans rather than of nature. The animal kingdom spends its time working to survive. Mankind needs more than work to survive; we need the arts to free our souls. Art itself has a soul it expresses emotions that mean different things to different people and brings hidden thoughts and feelings to the surface. Art validates the human spirit rather than the material aspects of human nature.

To be without art would leave us in an unhealthy state of decline. Art, music, and dance have been a part of all cultures. Where the visual arts survive, they become a record of the society, politics, and culture in which they were created.

Photography copies nature, places, and events and serves as memory joggers for artists. The arts can change the state of affairs, can be used for propaganda, and are of historical importance. Much of art is nonverbal communication that explains what words cannot.

Education in the arts is a valuable expression that broadens students understanding and appreciation of the world around us. It unleashes the mind from the stereotype box in which they are taught so that artists may see beyond. It taps into the imagination that sharpens insightful understanding that enhances their lives.

Visual arts that survive civilizations are gifts to the human spirit. The power of art is forever. It reaches into the emotions to be caught and used by other generations.

Music has the power to influence consciousness. The soundtrack of a frightening movie more than the images on the screen is what causes the skin to tingle. Music is recognized worldwide as a power. Islamic fundamentalists forbid it. Voodooists use it in rituals designed to alter consciousness. The Shaman uses a rhythmic drum-beat to get the body to join the spirit world. A composition of a variety of gongs and percussion instruments was used to arouse warriors before a battle in Bali. Highly developed drumming in African religion is capable of producing changes in awareness, including spirit possession, sexual excitement, trance, and often loss of consciousness.

Art is a communication channel that can take people and open them up in a unique way. Art can help us look not only to ourselves but also makes it possible to see others with greater insight and sensitivity. -- Norton Simon

Art is everywhere. It is the way we perceive it, in our hearts, in the world around us, in the way a horse runs, a cat purrs, and a fire crackles, in the trees of the forest and the roar of the sea. The elegant and the ugly know no bounds. It is up to artists to do what comes from their inner selves.

In 1933 Germany, Adolph Hitler imposed a Law for Cleansing of Artists and Musicians who did not fit his definition. He denounced the degenerate influence of the arts by all those who did not agree with his values or conform to his idea of how the Aryan race should be evolve. Anyone teaching art to sympathizers was fired or sent to a concentration camp. He closed the internationally renowned Bauhaus School which was Germany's most important and most innovative training center for the arts in existence. It had been founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius and was influential throughout the world. Gropius was innovative and called for art to become integrated into society and to play a role in the professional working world. The most prominent of the Bauhaus teachers immigrated to other countries; many eventually came to the United States.

There is the painful history of China's Cultural Revolution in 1962, when Mao empowered Red Guards to wipe out the old culture by destroying temples, artifacts, and books that did not conform to his way of thinking. It is believed by experts that hundreds of thousand of Chinese were killed and many more had their lives shattered. It was a decade of terror that lasted until Mao's death. Beijing has tried to erase those ten years as Deng Xiaoping resurrects China's economy.

In countries where artists express themselves freely, their art is a stimulus for better understanding of human nature. They are thought provokers, and movers of feelings. Artists expand the capacity for empathy, pleasure and growth of awareness. Art produced by free thinkers invigorates education, the environment, and business in communities. It was the artists who influenced the Civil Rights Movement. It is art that opens our minds to other ways of thinking.

Art is produced by free thinkers who reinvigorate education, the environment, and business in their communities. It teaches creative thinking skills, and creates something new, or adapts new vision to old ideas. It is a safe way to try out new ways of doing things. Art is an important tool for our society to educate and prepare an innovative workforce.

Where Art survives, communities thrive -- Ruth Waters

The well-being and the health of nations need the arts. A dynamic civilization is adaptable to change. Men and women advance new ideas, technologies, and new practices. If diversity is replaced by standardization, militarization occurs and the civilization disintegrates. Where works of art have been desecrated, countries have declined into poverty and crime.

It is a mistaken idea that art is only for the elite. It is for everyone. I invited my friends Basil and Clara Brandon to an art show and their explanation for refusing was that they didn't think they would be comfortable in that setting. They said it was too elegant.

The Olympics brings countries together in sports competition while the exchange of the Arts enhances understanding. Take a virtual worldwide journey with Char Pribuss in her book "Paintbrush Diplomacy" where she tells of her experiences exchanging children's art with sixty other nations. Char and her husband brought a handful of U.S.A. children's art as gifts to China in 1978. It was the first ticket into a regime closed to Americans. They traveled around the world exchanging gifts from children who were matched with children of other countries. You will appreciate how the exchange of children's art has brought a generation closer to understanding people of different cultures. One year they chose Word Beat as their theme which was music from their country. They told fourth-grade children from other countries about songs that were part of American history, such as "Yankee Doodle," "Take me Out to The Ballgame," and the "Star-Spangled Banner," and then had them write stories about them. American children also learned about numerous other countries. Congressman Tom Lantos has said, "The ingredients for peace are not only in the signature of a diplomat's pen but sometimes in the stroke of a child's paintbrush."

Native North American Indians from different tribes throughout the nation hold Powwows that bring them together. Gone are the days when they fought with one another. They socialize together by telling stories and having communal dancing.

The Westminster Playground in Washington, D.C., had a large brightly colored mural painted on the side of the wall of a house overlooking the playground that had been a problem site and it became a comfortable site as a gathering place. It is twenty-four-feet square and, though it is low to the ground, there has been no graffiti.

Culture enhances image. Where there is great art, people flock to see it, improves the reputation of the country, and stimulates the economy. Through the arts a country's history, politics and wars are graphically depicted, giving it a legacy of importance. History becomes more alive.

Engineers who are exposed to art are better prepared to conceptualize, as are technicians and builders. Teaching art encourages problem-solving. It is critical to the development of a healthy and creative industrial society as we change from heavy industrial to technological and service industries.