Ellen Noël, Oxy to continue bringing art to the classroom

For the past five years, the Ellen Noël Art Museum and Oxy have partnered for the Art 2 Go program which helps bring in art supplies to classrooms in the Permian Basin and that partnership will continue.

The Ellen Noël Art Museum announced Oxy’s sponsorship of an art restock for all Ector County and Midland ISD elementary schools participating in the museum’s Art 2 Go program.

The announcement of the continuing partnership was made at a media event Thursday at Wilkerson Boys and Girls Club where children participating in the Art 2 Go summer workshops were given free art supplies.

“Today, we’re here to provide art supplies to the students participating in the Boys and Girls Club,” Oxy Community Relations and Employee Engagement Manager for the Permian Basin Shelly Williams said. “Art 2 Go is offered at a number of community outreach locations during the summer and we wanted to bring the kids a nice surprise today with new art supplies.”

Oxy, a leading energy producer in the Permian Basin, was the first company to pledge a large, multi-year gift to the Ellen Noël Art Museum for the program — the largest donation the museum has received for a single program.

The gift has allowed the museum to provide onsite programming in all ECISD elementary schools and to expand Art 2 Go into MISD elementary schools.

“Oxy is really excited to continue our longstanding partnership with the Ellen Noël Art Museum as title sponsor of the Art 2 Go program,” Williams said. “We support the continued presence and expansion of Art 2 Go in Ector County ISD, Midland ISD and over 33 school districts in West Texas.”

Since the program began in 2019, Art 2 Go now reaches over 6,500 second-grade students in West Texas through both virtual and in-person learning.

“Oxy is dedicated to providing access to quality education in our communities,” Williams said. “Many of our school districts, particularly our teachers in the classrooms, need extra support with providing art opportunities for students. So we love our partnership with Ellen Noël. We’ve partnered with them for five years now to bring arts directly into the classroom. It does a phenomenal job of getting directly into the hands of the students.”

Ellen Noël Art Museum Executive Director Sheila Perry commented on the partnership and the Art 2 Go program.

“We’re here to celebrate a long-standing partnership with Oxy who has underwritten this program for the last five years,” Perry said. “This is an interdisciplinary program developed by the Ellen Noël to support ISDs all over the Basin. This is specifically a constructive program that combines literacy, visual literacy and art supplies.”

For Williams, Art 2 Go is not only a unique program but one that she believes helps students in other areas of learning.

“During the academic year, it supports second-grade students and it helps them with their TEKS-level visual literacy skills (and) art comprehension,” Williams said. “It helps with their reading comprehension and their reading and vocabulary. Arts can have a wonderful effect, but also be a whole lot of fun and let them be creative and express themselves.”

Perry echoed those thoughts.

“This program supports more than the fine arts,” Perry said. “It supports literacy, math and geometry. You need to be able to know how to use a pair of scissors, take direction but also you need to know how to be creative to be successful in the future. You need to be adaptable and think outside the box and that’s what this program does.”