SPAGHETTI & CAKE
What changes when adults stop asking only what children have learned and begin asking what children know, what they want to understand, and what they have to say?
Community as Curriculum.
Spaghetti & Cake is a community arts and education initiative grounded in the philosophy of Community as Curriculum. The project explores how public culture, street art, local history, and neighborhood spaces can serve as pathways to literacy, creative expression, inquiry, and community engagement.
Through workshops, artist-led projects, exhibitions, public art initiatives, family programs, and educational partnerships, Spaghetti & Cake invites children, families, educators, artists, and community members to participate in meaningful creative experiences that connect learning to the places and communities they inhabit.
Current and future programming may include visual arts workshops, literacy-focused art projects, community storytelling, artist residencies, exhibitions of children’s and community-created work, public art projects, family engagement events, and collaborations with schools, libraries, museums, and neighborhood organizations.
Projects may be presented through community exhibitions, public art installations, workshops, educational programs, publications, and both in-person and online platforms. Spaghetti & Cake seeks to create opportunities for participants to become authors, artists, storytellers, researchers, and active contributors to their communities while fostering literacy, creativity, belonging, curiosity, and lifelong learning.
Public Benefit
Spaghetti & Cake serves children, families, educators, artists, and community members through accessible arts and educational programming. The project is designed to increase opportunities for creative expression, inquiry, community participation, and literacy development through visual arts, public art, storytelling, and educational experiences.
Programs may be presented through workshops, community events, exhibitions, public art projects, educational partnerships, and family engagement activities. Public exhibitions and presentations provide opportunities for participants to share their work with the broader community and encourage meaningful engagement with local culture, creativity, and learning.
By making creative and educational experiences accessible to diverse communities, Spaghetti & Cake seeks to foster creativity, literacy, curiosity, belonging, lifelong learning, and civic participation.
What We Do
Creative Workshops
Hands-on experiences where children explore their own questions through art, storytelling, play, writing, making, and collaborative investigation.
Community Projects
Longer-term projects rooted in children's communities, ideas, and experiences, culminating in work created for real audiences and public spaces.
Young Authors & Artists
Opportunities for children to create, develop, and share original stories, artwork, books, and publications.
Public Exhibitions
Children's ideas move beyond the classroom through exhibitions and public projects that invite families and communities to encounter, celebrate, and respond to their work.
Coming Soon
Painting
Storytelling
Imagination
Let’s Keep In Touch
Have an idea, a question, or a space where Spaghetti & Cake could grow? We’d love to hear from educators, artists, families, community organizations, and anyone interested in making space for children’s ideas.
Qualifications
Founder and Director Melissa McCaig-Welles is an educator, curator, and community arts practitioner with more than twenty years of experience creating arts-based programs, exhibitions, and community engagement initiatives. She is the founder of McCaig-Welles Gallery, a contemporary art gallery and curatorial project that has organized exhibitions, public programs, and collaborations with artists and cultural organizations in New York and internationally.
Melissa currently teaches Kindergarten with New York City Public Schools and is a Graduate Assistant and Ph.D. Fellow in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) in Early Childhood Education and is an alumna of Teach For America. Her research interests include children’s visual and multimodal meaning-making, early literacy, community engagement, and the role of visual arts in education.
Across galleries, classrooms, and community spaces, Melissa has developed arts programming for children and families, created community-based projects, and worked with diverse learners in under-resourced educational settings. Her work is grounded in a belief that children are not simply recipients of knowledge, but active meaning-makers whose ideas, questions, images, stories, and ways of understanding the world deserve to be taken seriously.
Through Spaghetti & Cake, Melissa brings together her experience in the arts, education, community engagement, and research to create opportunities for creative expression, literacy development, inquiry, and public participation.