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Arts Olympiad


The Arts Olympiad is an international art competition for children ages 8 to 12 organized by International Child Art Foundation with one million participants from seventy countries. Each competition is four years long and it is held every four year. The competition includes the element of art and peace to encourage children around the world to use creativity and cooperation.

Dr. Ashfaq Ishaq, founder of the International Child Art Foundation, started the first Arts Olympiad competition in 1999 to address the issue which was coined decades earlier as the "fourth grade slump" in creativity. The researchers at the time suggested that the phenomenon is a result of a drop in creativity around the ages of nine as they start conforming to standardized testing and to please parents and teachers. The plan was to let children who were the winners of U.S. states and other countries to come together in a festival to let them work together and learn other cultures with the goal to move future generations toward global peace.

The theme for the first Art Olympiad was My World in the Year 2000 to ask children to create art in which they envisioned themselves in the new millennium. There was one million children in 86 countries in the program which was run between 1997 and 2000. The winning pieced from around the world were exhibited at the World Children’s Festival in 1999 on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The artworks were also later exhibited at the White House Millennium Celebration, the United Nations Headquarters, and the 2003 World Bank/IMF Annual Meetings in Dubai.

Since then the format of the global competition, a festival in Washington, DC and global exhibitions have been following the in the next Arts Olympiad cycles. The 2nd Arts Olympiad was held between 2001 and 2004 with the theme of Me in the New Millennium. Starting in the 3rd Arts Olympiad (2005-2008), the theme was shifted to relate art and sport to promote the artist-athlete ideal. The fourth Arts Olympiad (2009-2012) continued the same theme with title My Favorite Sport.


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