Jamestown arts center launches expanded all-day summer camps

For Jamestown parents trying to fill long summer days, the Jamestown Arts Center has expanded its all-day creative camps into a bigger, hands-on option for children and teens. The camps are built to keep students engaged for a full day while giving them a chance to sample multiple media in a single week, a format that can be especially useful for working families looking for structured activities close to home.

The center’s summer camp program emphasizes visual arts, music, theater and more, turning one week into a broad creative survey rather than a single-purpose class. That matters in a town where families often want nearby programs that do more than entertain. The Arts Center says it provides art and design education for all ages, and its offerings have stretched well beyond one discipline, including ceramics, stained glass, acrylic and watercolor painting, wood carving, photography, printmaking, fused glass, crochet and cake decorating.

The program is based at The Arts Center, 115 2nd Street SW in downtown Jamestown. The building includes an exhibition gallery, performance stage, classroom, office, artist-in-residence apartment and studio, giving the summer camps a setting that looks more like a working arts hub than a single classroom. The Jamestown Fine Arts Association, which operates the center, says its mission is to enrich the Jamestown area community through the arts and to provide a wide variety of arts activities for every age group and skill level.

The center’s youth work already shows steady demand. Its Arts After School program had a waitlist for students in grades 3-5, and before a planned renovation it could serve only 12 to 15 students per session across 30 sessions each school year. After renovation, the organization projected capacity for 56 students per school year. That kind of pressure helps explain why expanded summer programming is more than a seasonal add-on in Jamestown.

The arts organization also has deep roots in Stutsman County. Outside sources identify the Jamestown Fine Arts Association as a nonprofit founded in 1956, and the group marked its 60th year of creativity in 2024. In one summer season, a newsletter said more than 225 kids took part in camps ranging from ceramics to Seussical the Musical to Lego Camp, a sign that the programs have already become a major part of the city’s youth calendar. Its Artist in Residence program also reaches K-5 students in all six Jamestown elementary schools during the school year, extending that arts pipeline well beyond the summer months.