Client: Northern California Parent Magazine

The next time you’re looking for an interesting, educational and fun outing for the family, why not consider the nearest fine art museum. All right, settle down. I know what you’re thinking--a fine art museum is the LAST place on earth your child would choose when asked, “what do you want to do today?” After all, there are so many Toob-Towns, Q-Zars and Cal-Skates, and so little time. As a parent, you might worry that your children would be bored to death in a museum, moving in a herd from one static piece to the next.

On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t.

Creating art is the natural domain of every child and most are unselfconscious and highly productive artists from the moment they are old enough to pick up a crayon. So why not introduce your child to the world of fine art where people actually get paid—sometimes very large sums of money--to have that kind of fun.

Museums give public acknowledgement to what children are born knowing--that art is the purest form of self-expression. Bold colors and textures splattered across a 7-foot tall canvas, a blue fiberglass fish covered in bottle caps and Barbie Doll heads—art, especially modern art, seems to come from someplace within where there are no rules. Inside the walls of a museum like the DeYoung in San Francisco, children can discover all sorts of treasures. If mummies and artifacts from the dawn of civilization don’t excite your child’s imagination, then how about paintings of wild animals, kings and witches, and portraits of funny looking men, women and children posed in lavish costumes. Each one of us has marveled at the ability of our children to draw a wildly expressive character reminiscent of a Picasso, or paint a watercolor fused with the divine inspiration of a Monet. Isn’t it possible that at a fine art museum, our children might find concrete expression for what they have been “talking” about with their hands all along?

Learning how to navigate a fine art museum may take some practice and parents may opt to begin the journey towards art appreciation at one of the many Natural History museums throughout the Bay area. At a Natural History Museum like the one in San Francisco, very young children can first be introduced to the concepts of “look but don’t touch,” of walking (or being strolled) and discussing, of pondering and questioning familiar exhibits like dinosaurs, sharks, snakes, birds of prey, planets and stars. In Santa Rosa, the Sonoma County Museum offers a permanent exhibit depicting not only the history of the region, but its genealogy as well and is currently undergoing an exciting restoration of their entire permanent exhibit.

After you’ve exposed your children to the Natural History museums, take the bold step towards a museum like the DeYoung or the SFMOMA. San Francisco’s MOMA is a visual wonderland where a child’s imagination can run wild. Just down the road, children 8 and older will thrill to the hands-on experience of the newly opened Zeum, whose sole mission is to foster the creativity of young people. If your child is a creative genius between the ages of 8 and 18, Zeum is truly the hippest place on earth.

Hundreds of books have been written about making your child’s first visit to the art museum a pleasant experience. One of the best is “Visiting The Art Museum”, co-authored by Marc

Brown and his wife, Laurene. The Browns offer the following tips to make the most of your trip. Each can be adapted to make your child’s first outing to the museum both enlightening and entertaining.

1. Wear comfortable shoes.

2. Take breaks for snacks, drinks of water and take a forty-five minute lunch break.

3. Ask the information desk if there are materials or activities especially for children. At Zeum at Yerba Vista Gardens in San Francisco, children can make their own clay figures and then film them in a claymation movie!

4. Go on treasure hunts, searching paintings for things like hats, shoes, faces, beards. Whoever finds the most examples wins! This exercise introduces the child to the idea of really looking closely at a painting and understanding the relationships between different things in the painting.

5. Have your child describe what he or she thinks is happening in the painting and what might happen if the scene were continued.

6. Encourage your child to guess what sort of job each person in the painting had or what sort of life they led—were they rich or poor, soldiers, sailors or spys?

7. Ask your children which artwork in the gallery they like best and which they like least. Ask them to explain themselves and then tell them which you like best and least and why. Buy a postcard of their very favorite painting and bring it home. It will be an opportunity to study the painting further and follow up with books on the artist.

8. Talk about the people who painted the pictures, where they lived and how they worked, and how long it took to paint the picture. This is an excellent opportunity for children to understand that like everything worthwhile in life, creating a work of art takes time and perseverance.

9. Read books on the artist your child seems most drawn to and talk to them about that person’s life. If you familiarize yourself even a bit with an artist you will begin to see their work all around you and to understand from where they drew their inspiration.

10. Use the life of your child’s favorite artist to explore the times in which he or she lived or to learn geography by learning about the region where the artist was born.

As Thomas Merton said, "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. Find and lose yourself with your children at one of the Bay Area’s many fine art museums.

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