excursions for smalls (+tinies)

[psocoptera]

I took Junie to the MFA's free day! Well, also Q, but he's basically luggage. Here is my big tip for taking an almost-four-year-old to an art museum: I picked a couple of things to show Junie pictures of on my computer in advance, thus designating them Important (because they were on Mama's computer) and also making them Familiar. Then I told Junie we were going to look for them in the museum like a treasure hunt. It worked: she was excited to find them for real. I picked things that were featured on the MFA website, that I was pretty sure we'd be able to find - an Egyptian statue, because I thought the Egypt stuff in general might be appealing to look around at, and a painting of a real historical princess, because princess. (I had failed to write down gallery numbers, but my smartphone had a decent signal inside the museum... next time I will note gallery numbers.)

It was very interesting to be at an art museum with someone old enough to have opinions, but utterly ignorant of the cultural context of anything. Paintings of the Madonna and Child were "awww, a baby!". Egyptian coffins were "aww, people sleeping!". On the one hand I didn't want to, like, rain on her parade, on the other hand, I feel like part of the whole point of taking kids to museums is to grow their cultural context. So I did try to impart some key facts about things she was looking at, like, those coffins are actually boxes for dead people; lots of people painted pictures of a mama and a baby because they are Mary and Jesus and in the Christian religion the baby Jesus is part of an important story; those are not "farmer hats" those are halos which they put in paintings to say that those people were special. At one point she asked about a large painting of a winged dude hugging a lady which turned out to be an allegory for Time unveiling Truth or some shit like that and I attempted to explain the whole idea that if you didn't know how to paint a picture of Time, you could pretend it was a person and paint a person, because you knew how to paint that. At the end of our visit we checked out one of the MLKday participatory art activities and got into the sometimes delicate question of race education when she started coloring a picture of Rosa Parks peach. They had xeroxes of various likely suspects - MLK, Obama, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks - to color, and so first I had the "oh shit is that actually Rosa Parks or am I about to publicly misidentify a major historical figure" moment, and then the "oh god I'm a white person about to say something about race in front strangers some of whom are black" moment, and then I manned up and mentioned to Junie that the real Rosa Parks had brown skin, and Junie said well it was a picture of *her*, which, okay, fair enough. Later at home I showed her some computer pictures of Rosa Parks and attempted to explain a little bit about who she was in terms intelligible to an almost-four-year-old, so now my kid is aware that "some people used to have really mean bad rules that said that people with brown skin couldn't sit with people with white skin on the bus, and Rosa Parks worked hard to get rid of those bad rules". Junie was very indignant about the idea of people making mean bad rules and I am now crossing all of my fingers that she doesn't go to school and experiment with the idea of telling people with brown skin where they can sit.

And that was our trip to the MFA.

Comments

[eastgategirl.livejournal.com]

Fantastic! I couldn't get my kid to go to a museum with me until she was 16 and I took her to Paris...

[aryky.livejournal.com]

those are not "farmer hats" those are halos which they put in paintings to say that those people were special.

Can't help but comment on the halos since I had my own halo experience recently. My students (12-year-olds, at least some of whom have been specifically identified as gifted) were recently working on a grammar diagnostic test that included the word "halo." When we were going over the correct answers, it transpired that they only knew the video game and did not have any idea what "halo" would mean in any other context, so I explained halos to them. Then they started asking me where the idea came from. I admitted that I had no idea, especially since it was something used in both Christian and Buddhist art and had more or less the same meaning in both cultures. One kid eagerly responded that he knew where it came from in Buddhism and told me that there had been a mountain near where the Buddha lived which, if you climbed up it, granted you a halo, and that Buddha had climbed up this mountain. Personally I did think it was an interesting conversation, even if even looking on Wikipedia does not really clarify where the idea came from or why it is so widespread ;-) At any rate, by giving Junie information on halos now, you are clearly giving her an advanced start ;-)

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

as best as I can remember, the idea of depicting sacred/holy/special/powerful beings/people with something surrounding them is pretty ancient; Indian, Egyptian, Persian, although whether it's the kind of thing that multiple cultures came up with or whether there was a kind of ground zero I don't know. But using a mandorla (the giant almond-shaped full-body halo that shows up a lot in Byzantine Christian art and other early Christian stuff) is a pretty good way of setting the person in it off from the rest of the painting, kind of visually representing that they're in the world but also not in the world, etc etc. The head halo which developed much later is much less effective at just making that point without cultural context.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I like the artistic perspective - the idea of the original visual image being obvious and then it developing into something less obvious from there makes sense :)

[jaipur.livejournal.com]

Bwa hah! That is fantastic. Solid cultural upbringing. :)

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

I saw sarcophagi at the Met when I was five. My mom had to explain that mummies are dead bodies from thousands of years ago.

I had nightmares for years that sarcophagi were in our neighborhood.