Making Spaces for Kids and Families at The Museum of Modern Art
This series of posts celebrates the 80th anniversary of The Museum of Modern Art’s formal commitment to museum education. Elizabeth Margulies is the director of Family Programs and Initiatives in MoMA’s Department of Education.
In reflecting upon the 80th anniversary of the “Educational Project,” an initiative that formed the foundation for MoMA’s Department of Education, I’m struck by how much our current programs and resources for family audiences — both in concept and design — are built upon the ideas and innovations of those who came before.
A place for inspiration and participation
Victor D’Amico, the Museum’s first director of education, was a pioneer in art and museum education, dedicated to searching for the “best ideas and methods of teaching” art for all ages. The department played an important role in the discourse about experiential and experimental education through publications, annual conferences, exhibitions like the Exhibition of Creative Growth: Childhood to Maturity, and educational spaces like D’Amico’s Children’s Art Carnival. One of his most well known innovations, the Art Carnival functioned as a laboratory for researching, understanding, and demonstrating the creative growth of children.
Opened in 1942, the Children’s Holiday Carnival, as it was first named, was a space with equipment and materials designed especially for them, free from parental interference. D’Amico’s deep knowledge of child development was on display in every aspect of the Art Carnival, from the innovative physical space to the furniture and art-making supplies.
The Art Carnival welcomed four-to-12-year-olds with a “Contour Gate” to signal that only those within that age range could come inside; parents and caregivers watched from a window (or portholes, in some installations). Known by various names over the years, the Art Carnival was held annually at the Museum until 1952, and after 1955, often in conjunction with similarly themed exhibitions. Versions of the Carnival traveled to Europe and India, and in 1969 the Children’s Art Carnival found a permanent home in Harlem (MoMA, Victor D’Amico Papers).
The Art Carnival had two distinct areas, one for inspiring and motivating children and the other for art making. The “inspiration space” was a semi-darkened room with pools of light focused on the “motivations” D’Amico and others designed. The intended mood was “one of magic and fantasy, of a friendly forest, cool and quiet, with delightful surprises beckoning the child from every direction.” Music added to the mood, with such selections as “Swan Lake,” “The Nutcracker Suite,” and “Hansel and Gretel Suite” played on a loop. Motivations ranged from puzzles and toys to open-ended interactive activities: the Magnetic Picture Maker, a magnetized panel that allowed children to arrange geometric and organic shapes; the Game Table invited children to put together puzzles made from reproductions of modern art; and the Feeling Cat, a soft, catlike sculpture, arched it’s back when petted. These and other motivations were intended to stimulate the child to think creatively and orient him or herself to the fundamentals of design “without words or dogma of any kind” (D’Amico, “Experiments in Creative Art Teaching”).
Next, the child would enter the Studio-Workshop, also known as the “participation area,” a room lined with easels and filled with child-sized furniture. In the center of two round tables were lazy Susans divided into sections and filled with collage and construction materials. Rings hung from above invited mobile making.
Children worked independently and were assisted by an educator only when they didn’t know how to get started or when they needed help. It was a space designed to foster curiosity, discovery, experimentation, personal expression, and creativity just for children.
Flash forward
When I began working at MoMA, in 1999, there was a well-established program of tours, workshops, and films for families in place, but there wasn’t room to create a robust studio program or anything like the Art Carnival. We had a steady following of visitors, but the Museum had only one small, carpeted classroom in the basement without sinks (making it difficult to really experiment with a wide array of materials) and with very little space to store supplies.
With the Museum’s expansion in 2004, the Department of Education began to dream bigger. The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building gave us three classrooms with sinks and storage and the opportunity to welcome a much larger audience to engage with art in new ways.
Family Programs quickly grew from 1,800 participants a year to 10,000. We expanded our offerings of tours, art workshops, and films, and added artist talks and new resources for families. We have grown considerably since then, now welcoming over 40,000 visitors each year.
Playing with color
In 2008, Ann Temkin, then a curator (and now chief curator) of Painting and Sculpture, shared that she would love visitors to have the opportunity to play with color after they left her exhibition Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today. The small, under-utilized reading room on the first floor of the Education Building we were able to use had no sinks and a built-in desk too high for most children, but it was light-filled and had a beautiful view of the Sculpture Garden.
Focusing primarily on a theme of the Color Chart exhibition, color choice, we filled the space with materials, inviting children and adults alike to play with giant magnetic boards, arrange color puzzles, play games, and create their own color-choice system using colored pencils and paper. With a nod to Victor D’Amico, we also borrowed a replica of one of his motivations from The Art Barge — his Stained Glass Picture Maker/Design Color Window — and added it to the space. We called the space Color Lab.
It was a first attempt, and a pilot, but the reaction from the public was clearly positive.
In our first study of Color Lab we learned that families made active use of the materials, typically engaging in three to four of the eight activities offered in the space. One parent noted that “[It] challenges kids’ curiosity and relates to the works of art they have just been seeing” — one of our primary goals.
Visitors experimented, with great breadth and depth, creating their own ways to play with and investigate color and design, according both to the instructions presented and to their own ideas and imaginations. Over two thirds reported that they invented their own activities with the large magnet boards, which spoke to the flexible, open-ended design of the activity.
Most significantly to us, visitors noted that the lab was a “wonderful way to make the museum accessible to all family members.”
Art Lab today
Nine years since our pilot project, Art Lab, as it is now called, continues with rotating installations. Still in the same location just off the Sculpture Garden, the space is open year-round. Art making is also fully integrated into the experience, though because the space doesn’t have sinks, we focus on “dry” materials and explorations. Each new installation is conceived around a familiar theme such as places, materials, process, shape, nature — focused yet child-friendly lenses through which to explore the Museum’s collection and exhibitions.
As with the Art Carnival, we have found that the design of the space is just as important as the materials offered in making a child feel welcome. Our Graphic Design team has won numerous awards for bold installations that welcome families, subtly reference themes, and maintain a connection to the visual identity of the rest of the Museum.
One main difference between our space and the Art Carnival is that in the lab we fully embrace parents and caregivers, and also invite adults to explore on their own. Through conversation and evaluation, we have found that adults have a strong desire to share the MoMA experience with their children, discovering art and culture together. As John H. Falk noted, the clearest predictor that a person will be a museumgoer as an adult is whether he or she was brought to a museum as a child. Art Lab is a way to extend and enhance family visits to MoMA.
Like the Art Carnival, our lab is now staffed. Facilitators and volunteers welcome visitors into the space and help them make connections between their time in the galleries and the activities in the lab. Like researchers, facilitators provide us with insights into how people interact and engage with the space and each other. Facilitators document their questions, challenges and discoveries, allowing us to iterate and improve; making it a lab for both visitors and staff.
Finally, like D’Amico’s Art Carnival, Art Lab is a multisensory environment where visitors can create their own meaning through a combination of hands-on, open-ended, and guided activities. Kids and adults experiment, play, and create as they make connections between their own creative explorations and the ideas, tools, and techniques of modern and contemporary art.
What started as an experiment has become part of the fabric of the museum; Art Lab has changed the relationship that children and families have to MoMA, and what an art museum visit can be. We continue to pilot new experiences and methods of engagement, while striving to support the specific, yet diverse, needs of our family audience.
Looking forward
Art Carnival broke new ground as an experimental space dedicated and carefully designed to support the development of a child’s creativity. As we look forward to the completion of our next building project, in 2019, it is even more important that we continue to look back at models such as D’Amico’s Art Carnival: how it engaged our youngest visitors, paid attention to their specific needs, and provided a space designed to help them understand and enjoy the art of our time. The research we do now will inform our future. By investing in family audiences, we are investing in future generations of museumgoers.
