Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The city’s museums offer cultural sustenance for tourists and residents. They are also seats of prestige and power for their benefactors.
Easy to overlook on a crowded weekend afternoon is the role museums play in educating children.
Public school children make several visits a year to different museums, where educators use the collections to enrich critical and creative thinking.
“Art provides a context in which judgment is exercised in the absence of rules, which is what doesn’t exist in the classroom,” an education professor at Stanford University, Eliot Eisner, author of “The Arts and the Creation of Mind” (Yale University Press), said.
The National Art Education Association writes on its Web site that art education teaches visual literacy, cultural values, and the joy of work for work’s sake.
While some of the city’s museums accommodate upward of 65,000 school children on class visits annually, regular family visits are also important.
And what could be more thrilling than visiting the museum at night – as Claudia and Jamie discovered in E.L. Konigsberg’s “From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.”
On Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, the children didn’t sneak in. They were invited, with their parents, to the annual Family Party. The guest list numbered 624, with $40,000 raised for the museum’s education programs – a small but helpful contribution to the museum’s annual operating budget of $27 million.
Eighteen of the museum’s 20 full-time educators, four adult volunteers, 12 high school museum apprentices, and seven volunteers from the New York City Museum School were on hand to help children discover the museum’s Asian art collection and the meaning of the Lunar New Year holiday.
The activities included a treasure hunt for ages 6 and under, designing one’s own lion mask, and, for teenagers, a demonstration of games and puzzles from the collection, including handpainted Japanese poetry cards.
St. Ann’s students Justin Haddock and Austin Dracott were sprawled out on the floor, figuring out a Chinese version of chess.
“We try to be mindful of who is in Brooklyn. The complexion of Brooklyn has changed: It’s Caribbean, Jewish, there’s the baby boom in Park Slope, kids from Brooklyn Heights,” the vice director of education, Radiah Harper, said.
Addressing changing demographics is the topic of the annual conference in May of the New York City Museum Educators Roundtable, which has 300 members.
The Lunar New Year party drew a diverse group of Brooklynites, most of whom were united in their choice of attire (silk pajamas, chop sticks in their hair), not to mention their appetite for the Chinese food served: dumplings, sesame noodles, fortune cookies. Apart from the art, the most exciting part of the event was seeing and participating in the lion dance, performed with the help of the Kung Fu association Yee’s Hung Ga of Park Slope.
“I’m happy to see the museum reaching out to the community in this way,” a parent watching the lion dance, Ken Howe, said. “With two kids, we usually can’t go out on a Saturday night, so this is great.”
