Matt Bua is still working hard on his detailed Kidspace installation.

This guy greets you when you walk in the door.

Some of Matt’s collections:

carrots

rope

luggage

slides

and he’s still unpacking more every day.

Remember the opening is March 21 11 AM – 5 PM.

Matt Bua arrived yesterday in a snowstorm and in just 24 hours he’s made enormous progress toward his upcoming installation in Kidspace which opens with a Family Celebration on Saturday, March 21.

He’s creating his installation from hundreds of pieces of detritus — the flotsam and jetsam of life that he has found on city streets.

Here’s a peek inside one of the still-to-be-unpacked crates he brought.

Some of the things he’s already unpacked are batteries,

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For the past several months there’s been a terrific program at Kidspace for teenage girls called The Mona Lisa Project. This is the description from their site:

The Mona Lisa Project is designed for eighth grade teenage girls who are seeking the opportunity to explore art and yoga. MLP will help to develop multiple art-making and yoga skills, as well as to empower young women through creative acts, health awareness, and leadership activities.

They’ve been keeping a blog detailing their activities and its a delight to read.  Please check back often to see what these impressive women are up to!

Here is a note from our fabulous Kidspace Director Laura Thompson:

Every time I tell people where I work they say that I must really like my job because for the past six years I have commuted to North Adams 3 -5 days a week from Saratoga New York.  On good days it takes me 1 ½ hours to drive through upstate New York and part of Vermont to get to the Berkshires.  On bad days, it could take up to 2 ½ hours. A bad day is when I have to follow a log truck going 35 miles an hour all the way up Route 7 because there is no place to pass.  Or during a rainstorm when people forget how to drive.  Springtime sometimes makes me late for work when the ducklings are crossing at the farm in Pownal (or that day that a large old turtle was crossing, ugh!).

But what I really think about my job is this… I am consistently impressed with the amazing things that the museum accomplishes.  I have worked for some really difficult and struggling organizations, where staff animosity was deathly and unproductive to say the least.  MASS MoCA, on the other hand I call “my happy place� where there is a great deal of support and positive energy, and fun (how about that in the workplace!).

The perception some have of the museum field is that the more renowned the organization the more pretentious the staff.  Some friends once said to me that staff at many museums take themselves too seriously and from my early experience in museums I can bear witness to this: for example, at one museum I worked for, staff was not allowed to call the museum director by his first name.

What inspired me to write this blog entry was in response to an impromptu family outing Joe (MASS MoCA director) planned a few weeks ago where all staff and their families were invited to go bowling and have pizza. My husband sometimes kids me when I tell him I want to go up to the museum on my day off for a staff event or museum program…�it’s work�, he says.  But I know, he knows my work is so different from his work in the cubicle-filled, florescent-lighted for-profit world. (Don’t even get me started on the difference: just know that the people on the tv show The Office and comic strip Dilbert are not fiction!)

The bowling party was a simple thing to do but really reinforced my belief that museums (or any job excluding brain surgeons) that take themselves too serious are a drag. Or as Martinetti said in 1908 “Museums, cemeteries! But to take for a daily walk through the museums our spleen, lack of courage, and morbid restlessness, we will not grant it!…Why will you poison yourselves? Why will you decay?� I don’t think he had MASS MoCA in mind when he said this.

(The Thompson family at the bowling party)

Laura Thompson
Director of Exhibitions and Education
Kidspace at MASS MoCA

Jo Edmondson who has been a Kidspace intern for the past half year or so will be leaving us soon and offers these reflections on her time at Kidspace and MASS MoCA.

Before we go into the museum let’s all take out our keys. Wait… you can’t find your key. Dig deeper, mine is bright orange with gold glitter, it is sticky and bendy. This key will be used to open our imaginations. Sometimes your key is on top of your head, or maybe sitting on your shoulder. Now that we all have our keys, let’s put on our big museum hats. My hat is three feet tall, black velvet, with red and orange polka dots, these hats will transform us to a new place. Today we are going to be transported into the sky, fly with the birds.

In my work at Kidspace I have tried to reflect diversity, global social issues, and our contemporary culture through the art that I teach; allowing students to express their own voice through their art and to question the world through observation of artists and their works. Art teaches us valuable lessons in life and a certain logic in thought process which can be translated to other areas of study. Kidspace provides children with a great sense of accomplishment and self esteem. We are in the business of stimulating the imagination and causing children to dare to dream.

Each child has brought something new to my life, a new question, a new answer, a new interpretation, a new perspective. If you watch close enough you will see a trail of magic dust follow each of children as they skip and explore the gallery space.

A magical pipe cleaner tree for caterpillars, a blue robins egg nest made from a coffee filter, a wire rollercoaster made for ants and of course a wood block with a painted circle, a portal to the universe.

This is what I take with me when I leave MASS MoCA, the stories of a world that exists in our imagination. In a time when life can be a little hard, when we are challenged as a community and as a people, it is important to learn from these kids. A little imagination and creativity can go a long way to making the world a better place.

Many children who come to Kidspace may have aspirations of picture coloring and that will keep them content. Their parents may be looking for an oasis where the kids will be occupied for a few minutes and they can move on to the “real art�. As an intern here for the summer I found so much more than coloring pictures and parents resting while their children ran circles around them…I found an actual children’s contemporary art gallery.

In all honesty, the first lesson I learned here was that we do not make crafts. We make and exhibit real art at Kidspace. Kids come to the gallery to learn about art and to make a project that reflects what they have learned. When I say art, I mean challenging art that makes them think and is relative to their life. Interpretations, the current show at Kidspace, is made out of over 40,000 spools of thread hung upside down throughout the gallery. The images are reproductions of classics like the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and American Gothic. As an art student I thought it was pretty clever. As an education intern, I didn’t know how we were going to talk to kids about this work. I mean at first I thought, what is a 5-year-old going to get out of this exhibit?

With these questions swimming in my head, I began preparing for my first official Kidspace tour. We broke down the work by asking kids questions such as what is a pixel and why does the art have “crystal balls� propped up in front of them? (hint, they are not to swing around on). After the kids thoughtfully examined the work that we showed them, they dug into making their own pixelated images. The things that they came up with were fantastic. Not only did some of the pixel drawings have a story behind them, but some were upside down like the artist’s work, some were a copy of the Mona Lisa. Kids were starting to pick up and run with the theme of Interpretations: they were interpreting art in their own unique way.

As my time here at Kidspace wraps up, I’ll be giving a tour to a group of middle school students. Once we are done discussing American Gothic and The Girl with a Pearl Earring, I will get to watch them create inspired images. Maybe after that I’ll be more inspired in my own art. Trust me; I won’t be working on any crafts.

-Erin Dougherty, Kidspace Summer 2008 Intern
Graduate Student, Arts Education, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, MN