The New Art Basics project believes that each child is born with a natural birthright for visual and creative thinking. That birthright needs to be nurtured and brought out in each student through solid thinking skills education. The project maintains that it is not enough to simply place the child in a school art classroom and attempt to input preordained curricular content. The seven content areas of the New Art Basics project are viewed as a rainbow of inherent human possibilities that should be encouraged to shine from every child.
NAB, coordinated from the College of Design at Iowa State University, was created in 1986 as a coalition of professional art teachers, graduate students in art education, and art education faculty and staff at ISU. The project utilizes an online database with over 2000 teacher-designed and classroom-tested art strategies composing our "Living Curriculum" which is constantly evolving and improving.