The Art of Awesome

Oh, Cleveland. You never cease to amaze. We made time in our crazy June schedule to visit the new Gallery One at the Cleveland Museum of Art and I am so glad we did. This place was incredible! For those of you in the Cleveland area who haven't gone yet, go! It's free! It's fabulous!
There is a whole children's room with hands on activities that familiarize kids with pieces of art. That way, when you tour the galleries as a family it becomes a treasure hunt. The kids recognize the pieces from the games they played and get excited about the familiarity. The boys were actually asking for more information about the pieces that they identified. It was just lovely. We were there for hours and I wish we would have scheduled more time. So, here comes a whole boatload of pictures just in case you aren't convinced of the awesomeness of Gallery One yet.
The first thing our boys were attracted to was the giant touchscreen. I'm not sure who came up with this idea, but it is super cool. The boys could draw a shape and then the program would search through the museum's catalog and find a piece of art with a similar shape or profile. The boys figured out that certain shapes were more likely to get them something manly like a suit of armor so it became a game to see who could get the most awesome looking artwork to appear on the screen.

All of the boys spent long amounts of time with the sculptural materials available. Here are Elijah and Benjamin with their metal mobile sculptures a la Alexander Calder.

The magnetic blocks were a big favorite for Gabe. He loves to build with blocks at home, but it was even more fun to build with blocks that didn't slide around or fall over.

David John was very serious about his string art..

All the boys made a project of putting together mosaics all over the carpeted area of the kids room.

This was another popular activity. More touchscreens had games involving works of art. Several pieces from the catalog would appear on screen as well as a key word such as "star". The boys then had to select all the works of art that had stars in them. Some of the matches were tricky. Sometimes you had to find a minute detail in a painting or identify a very stylized sculpture. As you can see, they were mesmerized and I confess to playing this game quite a few times myself.

This wall was made of magnetic color blocks and had magnets featuring pieces from the museum's collection. The idea was to play curator and organize the pieces into the "rooms" however you wanted. Some of our boys sorted by type i.e. furniture, statue, painting, etc. Others sorted by style or by the color of the magnet's border. I loved seeing their different ideas about what belonged together.

Outside of the children's area was an activity in which a statue appeared on screen and you had to try and match the body positioning of the statue. Marc was a master at this, and always got scores between 90 and 100 percent matching. I, on the other hand, stank. I was just really bad. I would get between 50 and 70 percent every time. Oh well. The boys were too small for the camera to register so Marc took them one at a time to try it out. Here are the results:

This fabulous touchscreen wall allows you to browse through the museum's catalog by theme, by year, by geographical location, pretty much in any way you would like. You can also use an ipad or smart phone to download thematic tours of the museum. Just incredible.

Aside from the technology, the architecture of the museum is beautiful. The atrium was just lovely and gave the boys a little space to run without fear of bumping into something priceless.

*Sigh. Why is it that you can only truly appreciate something when your about to leave it? Anyway, we truly had a priceless experience and the Ricks boys give Gallery One a ten.