Youth Art Month
March 1 – 31
ArtLab | Free, drop-in during open hours

The World Needs Art

Welcome to Youth Art Month 2026! This year, to celebrate Youth Art Month in March, CMCA is making art with reclaimed materials to encourage environmental stewardship and civic engagement based on the Youth Art Month 2026 theme: The World Needs Art.

Engage with Youth Art Month: 

• Join us during ArtLab open hours for our March Open Studios activity Reclaim and Reimagine. Check the website for open hours or call ahead.

• Use our Youth Art Month Packet at home to make art from household materials that might otherwise become landfill, while learning about how recycling works and artists who help their communities by making recycling into a creative practice. Use the reflection prompts and conversation starters to brainstorm how you can help your own community and shape the world around you. Share your creations with us on social media with @cmcanow

• Get inspired by these Maine creatives/projects with environmental impact at the forefront; Marcis Curtis, Second Story Builders in Union, and Resisting Entropy, a collaborative reuse project shared by midcoast artists.

Marcis Curtis Artist Statement
“I spent almost a decade in St. Louis, and I had an apartment near a bakery that would consume hundreds of eggs daily in their operations. When taking the trash out I would encounter stacks of egg cartons looking like small skyscrapers next to the dumpster, or having been blown over by the wind, now a tattered quilt of cardboard across the alley. These structures drew me in, and I started seeing interesting pulp paper packaging shapes in the dumpsters more and more. Each item has been carefully measured, a pulp paper mold engineered perfectly to ensure its safe delivery, only to be discarded immediately upon receipt. 

In saving these forms and adorning them with details and attention, I feel like an archaeologist uncovering the lost deities of another world. This adornment is a way for me to process the enormity and absurdity of modern life, to slow down and see beauty everywhere, and to bring forth the imaginative child within. From turning over rotten logs in the woods as a kid in Maine, to exploring abandoned buildings in my adolescence, I have always found beauty in the structure of what was and the process of decomposition. A decaying tree often supports more life than a 'perfectly' healthy one. Over time the patterns in nature and human engineering erode and collapse in on themselves, recombining into interesting new forms.”