Step inside the framework of famous paintings and experience art like never before in Framed: Step into Art, opening at Bowers Museum's Kidseum on Sunday, January 26, 2014. Children and adults can enjoy a robust noontime meal in Grant Wood's Dinner for Threshers, climb into
a tent and explore camping gear in John Singer Sargent's Camp at Lake O'Hara and add "corn husks" to the flower tower in Diego Rivera's Corn Festival. Enter Clementine Hunter's Big Chicken and get behind the reins of a giant rooster. Visitors can explore a small collection of Mona Lisa prints featuring the original and famous parodies, then step behind a cutout version and replace Mona Lisa's face with their own. Framed continues at Kidseum through September 21, 2014.
Dinner for Threshers by Grant Wood
Enter Grant Wood's Dinner for Threshers and learn about rural life at the turn of the century. Visitors can tend to a chicken and eggs, prepare a meal in the kitchen, set the dining table, enjoy a noontime dinner, and mix and match the farmers' patterned shirts. Observe the painting's details, such as patterns, the farmers' tan lines and the hour of the meal.
Camp at Lake O'Hara by John Singer Sargent
Visitors travel to the Canadian Rockies in 1916 at John Singer Sargent's Camp at Lake O'Hara. Children can climb inside a tent and explore camping gear like Sargent would have used. After cooking a pretend meal over the campfire, kids can tell stories around the fire and arrange items in a magnetic frame to show what a painting of today's campsite may look like.
Big Chicken by Clementine Hunter
Step inside Big Chicken by Clementine Hunter, Louisiana's most famous female artist and folk art icon, and create imaginary animals like Hunter's "goosters" by mixing body parts. Children and adults can load the cart with cotton, climb behind the reins of the giant rooster and take their load to town.
Corn Festival by Diego Rivera
Travel south of the border through this piece from the Court of Fiestas in the Ministry of Education Building in Mexico City. Visitors can explore a rendition of one of Rivera's frescos, add flowers and ribbons of "corn husks" to the flower tower for a celebration and include their flourish in a mural on a miniature building.
This exhibit encourages children to ask questions and find answers through the exploration of art, and gain an understanding that everyone can have fun with art and appreciate it. Using art as a tool for expression and understanding, parents and grandparents are encouraged to help children view art as an important aspect of our lives. Bowers hopes everyone enjoys this opportunity to explore art from the inside out.
Framed: Step into Art was created by Minnesota Children's Museum.