Children's museum invites youngsters to step inside contemporary art

By TARA BURGHART, Associated Press

NEW YORK — It's a museum guard's worst nightmare: children plucking heads off sculptures, placing their palms on paintings and moving around the artists' works.

But with a new exhibit at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, meant to introduce children to art and the creative process, such behavior is encouraged.

In "Art Inside Out," children can "step into" 70 original works and 40 interactive stations by three contemporary artists— the playful art of Elizabeth Murray, the installations of Fred Wilson and the work of William Wegman, known especially for his photos of Weimaraner dogs.

It is symbolic of the new territories children's museum are taking. Not content to just let kids romp around amid science exhibits, they are now tackling subjects such as contemporary art and cultural identity while positioning themselves as community gathering places.

At the Children's Museum of Houston, visitors can explore a replica of a mountain village in Mexico. The Children's Museum of Los Angeles has a traveling literacy project that blends theater, music and storytelling. And starting in 2004, 70 children's museums across the country will host exhibits on east Asia as part of a coordinated effort stemming from a $7 million grant.

There are now up to 300 children's museums in the United States, with more than 100 opening since 1990 and 80 more in the planning stages, according to the Association of Children's Museums.

Last year, 31 million children and families visited children's museums, more than triple the attendance figure in 1991, according to the group.

Despite the popularity of children's museums, the yearlong "Art Inside Out" exhibit was a daring try.

It required the children's museum to find three diverse artists willing to create works especially for the museum, ones that would allow children to play and relate while also encouraging learning.

The result "gives kids the skills to look at art — to decipher and decode art on their own," said the museum's executive director, Andrew S. Ackerman.

Visitors are able to enter a room-sized version of one of Murray's paintings where they can move around huge magnetized versions of her colorful, warped shapes.

The Wegman exhibit is set up like a house, where visitors see an early video he made of talking lamps and can choose from various props, costumes and backdrops to take photos like he does of his dogs.

In Wilson's "museum," visitors discover display cases full of original historic artworks, such as three very different busts of George Washington, and can also change the heads of statues of animals and people.

In all three sections, visitors have a chance to use interactive displays to alter the artists' works or try out their own artmaking methods.

Wilson said that although he regularly works with museums — taking objects from collections and rearranging them to suggest new meanings — a children's museum was a unique challenge. One of the easiest things he had to do was lower all the statue's pedestals.

He also wanted to focus on a subject to which children could relate. He chose bullies — as shown in an arrangement in which Napoleon is surrounded by an army of ferocious animals while facing a soldier.

One child asked if Napoleon was angry at himself or someone else — a question that delighted Wilson.

"What I like is the exhibit allows them a way to access their own feelings and ideas about things in an environment where their ideas and imagination are validated," he said.

But he believes the exhibit has also given adults who accompany the children a way to experience art in a nonthreatening, hands-on way.

Ackerman said another goal of the exhibit was to show that creating art is full of hard work and redoing, which often frustrates children so much that they get turned off to the process.

"While all kids are creative, not all children are artists. To be an artist requires a level of expertise, knowledge and creativity combined," Ackerman said. "We don't say to kids, 'You're an artist.' We say, 'Be as creative as you want, and you can hope to become an artist, but you have to really work at it.' "

Rebecca Celli, 9, spent a recent afternoon at the museum, pointing out some of her favorite parts of the exhibit.

She picked up a sculpture of a monkey and a figure of a mouse in Wilson's section and took a digital picture of it, calling it "Best Friends."

"It shows the different ways you can look at things, and I think that's really cool," she said. "It's very your thing."

"Art Inside Out" will be on exhibit at the Children's Museum of Manhattan through December 2003. A version will probably tour to other children's museums elsewhere in the United States.

On the net:

Association of Children's Museums: www.childrensmuseums.org/

Children's Museum of Manhattan: www.cmom.org/