Joy is tactile, joy is ease, joy is colorful, joy is feeling connected to our friends and community and humanity and the earth, joy is made of attention . Joy can be loud or joy can be quiet. Joy is whimsical and light.
What does joy look like?
Our approach
Our Team
The Oh! Canary Teaching Team is made- up of good humans with Art Education, Early Childhood education, General Ed, and Fine Art degrees. They are inspiring, thoughtful, patient, nurturing and they love being with children.
Oh! Canary has a deep respect for professional educators, and we believe strongly that there is an art to teaching art!
Our coordinators and managers are community- oriented, logistics saavy, and joyfully produce our Oh! Canary programming with the best possible experience in mind.
Our Story
Oh! Canary was founded by Lacey Buccellato in 2017. Lacey got her masters degree in art education in 2011, and over the next few years taught art in Reggio Emilia inspired preschools and public schools in NYC & SOMSD.
After living in Maplewood for a couple years she piloted her own process & play based classes centered around young children. What started once a week in a shared space graduated into our own small shoebox location in Maplewood.
In 2020 we quadrupled our square footage in South Orange just in time for the pandemic to hit. We worked really hard to respond to the community's needs, sold art kits with accompanying video lessons and held outdoor classes and small groups indoors.
We came out of those years stronger, wiser and more creative than ever and opened our second studio for the Montclair community in September of 2024. Our studios are bright and bursting with imagination, and our team brings forth decades upon decades of experience working with children.
“Oh!”: a verbal expression of a discovery. “Canary”: a sweet symbol of joy and freedom. There are infinite discoveries available in art materials, and our studio is a space to joyfully explore materials and the innate human desire to play and create, freely.
We know that exploration leads to discovery, and discovery leads to insights about how we can use art materials to express our thoughts and feelings.
We believe that visual art and play offer children languages that they are not able to access otherwise. The art- and its process- is not merely a pretty painting, but an expression of the child themself - nuanced and varied and full of meaning.
