| |
DETAILS |
|
|
I knew when we saw Olafur Eliasson’s exhibit, “Take Your Time” at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, the time had come to take the grandchildren ( 9 and 12) to an art museum. What made this the perfect beginning experience was the interactive components of the exhibit. YOU were to be involved in the creation of the art, from stepping on a raised plank to make water ripple on a big screen, to standing inside a large kaleidoscope peering out at refracted images. I wanted the children to know that going to an art museum was a cool thing to do. I also wanted them to look at the paintings. How was I going to make that happen without boring them? We devised a painting hunt.
Prior to taking the children, my husband and I cased the permanent collection and made a list of clues to paintings, i.e. a big Mark Rothko was “huge orange blotch with blue beneath” and an Andy Warhol self portrait was “Man With a Red Face.” There were 12 paintings on the list, spanning 5 rooms. We provided the children with pencils and a tablet on which were written the clues. You were to write the name of the painting and it’s painter in the spaces provided. In order to curtail running, it wasn’t a contest, you just had to find all the paintings and when you did, if you got them all right, chocolate was your reward. It was
a tremendous success and an outing that could be adapted to any museum. One cautionary note: Discuss museum rules before you begin – no running and no touching the paintings or getting too close.
|
|
