We took a trip to Mass MOCA the other weekend, it was President's Day weekend and the children's museum I've been hoping to go to with the kids was closed on a Monday, so Mass MOCA seemed like the next best thing. It's a modern art museum housed in a former factory not dissimilar to the Tate Modern in London and I thought the large spaces and large works of art wouldn't be so difficult to navigate our children through.
The highlight of the trip was the giant elevator. We managed to race through the galleries in a record 40 minutes unscathed and ate our packed lunch in the lobby and were going to get out earlier than our set time, when Z. declared he wanted to go back in to see the exhibition of falling ping ping balls. As we had time we went back in but not before stopping by the information desk where the nice woman at the desk gave a thoughtful demonstration of how the pieces of graphite used in one massive display all over the walls of the first gallery were magnets and also you could use them to write... This was not a smart thing for us to have showed my 3 year old son who is consumed minute by minute by a greater curiosity than control of his impulses and when faced with the artwork of tiny graphite pieces stuck on the wall like magnets could therefore not help but take one of the graphite pieces off of the wall to see how it worked...
Of course we scolded him, we were mortified, apologized to the guard as I scrambled to try to get the piece of graphite back onto the wall while with baby R. in the sling not quite able to align the piece with the circle of black from which it came. But it was our fault, of course it was, trusting that a three year old when faced with wall after wall of these fun little rocks of magnets which also can write wouldn't want to grab one and test it out? We were all tempted to, take them off the wall, rearrange them, use them to black out the white spaces left on the wall... It made me long for more interaction with the art we weren't allowed to touch, not necessarily what the artist had intended, maybe he wanted us to experience the longing to play...
The highlight of the trip was the giant elevator. We managed to race through the galleries in a record 40 minutes unscathed and ate our packed lunch in the lobby and were going to get out earlier than our set time, when Z. declared he wanted to go back in to see the exhibition of falling ping ping balls. As we had time we went back in but not before stopping by the information desk where the nice woman at the desk gave a thoughtful demonstration of how the pieces of graphite used in one massive display all over the walls of the first gallery were magnets and also you could use them to write... This was not a smart thing for us to have showed my 3 year old son who is consumed minute by minute by a greater curiosity than control of his impulses and when faced with the artwork of tiny graphite pieces stuck on the wall like magnets could therefore not help but take one of the graphite pieces off of the wall to see how it worked...
Of course we scolded him, we were mortified, apologized to the guard as I scrambled to try to get the piece of graphite back onto the wall while with baby R. in the sling not quite able to align the piece with the circle of black from which it came. But it was our fault, of course it was, trusting that a three year old when faced with wall after wall of these fun little rocks of magnets which also can write wouldn't want to grab one and test it out? We were all tempted to, take them off the wall, rearrange them, use them to black out the white spaces left on the wall... It made me long for more interaction with the art we weren't allowed to touch, not necessarily what the artist had intended, maybe he wanted us to experience the longing to play...
