The artist at work.
Yesterday, we completed the Day 4 activity but I didn’t get to write about it because my children hate sleep. When I got home from work, we had a lovely time poking, smashing, smudging, and squishing leaves, weeds, and clover into finger paint. Sprout also used his fingers to create a lovely swirl of red and blue.
Welcome to Day 4 of the Outdoors Family Challenge! This is a seven day challenge to help get you and your kids outside, living more sustainably, and connecting more with nature and each other. You can read about our experience yesterday or check out the archived prompts on the Outdoors Family Challenge page. If you would like updates each morning with the activities, sign up for the email list or like my Facebook page.
Integrate nature into art
Nature has inspired creative expression since art began! Many of the earliest cave paintings are of animals. In addition to inspiring art, nature can also provide the canvas and tools to create it.
Go outside and find some materials you and your kids can use to make art. Some possibilities include leaves, acorns, pinecones, blades of grass, sticks, dirt, sand, water, and weeds. Let the materials themselves inspire you.
When Chris and I house-sat for a rather eccentric couple several years ago, we routinely got newsletters for the National Building Museum. “Who would go to the National Building Museum?” I’d say. “That sounds incredibly boring.” Eight years later, the answer to that question is “My family.” This past weekend, we escaped the heat by visiting the National Building Museum’s Icebergs exhibit, as well as their Play Work Build and Building Zone areas. Contrary to my initial assessment, the National Building Museum is a great place to bring kids that’s rather different from the usual museum crawl.
The big draw for us this summer was the Icebergs exhibit, one of the museum’s signature summer art events. While it wasn’t as over-the-top as last year’s The Beach – where they covered their massive atrium with one million white balls – it still had some serious grandeur.
Photo of the Week – Goslings!
I’ve been posting three times a week for the past few weeks, so I’ve got a whole backlog of articles! From sleep deprivation to nature and art making kids kinder, there’s a whole lot of good stuff here.
I’m a fan of “big art” – sculptures that fill entire rooms, take up your entire scope of vision, and make you lose yourself inside of. So when I heard about the Renwick Gallery’s Wonder exhibition, I knew we had to go. Nine rooms, each featuring a thematically and physically large piece designed to provoke wonder, hit all of my aesthetic buttons. While bringing a little kid to an art museum is always a bit of a crapshoot, I hoped that Sprout would enjoy it as well.
Arriving at the museum on Saturday, we found that we were in luck – we happened to come on the Smithsonian art museums’ Family Fun Day. While people have generally been welcoming when we’ve brought him to art museums in the past, this just added an extra layer of normalcy and acceptance.
From the museum’s formal lobby, we entered the first room, filled with sculptures crafted out of sticks collected from the forest floor. Weaving our way around, it evoked the feeling of being somewhere ancient, hidden and enchanted. It was a fairy tale wonderland, a place where gnomes or huge, intelligent birds might make their home. In fact, we actually used children’s stories to relate it to Sprout. We remarked, “This is what Big Bird’s nest might be like!” and “Doesn’t this remind you of the second house in the Three Little Pigs?” (Although he might not have fully understood the point of that story – he said he would like to live in a house made of sticks. Of course, if they were this lovely, perhaps I would too.)
Art is good for kids and kids are good for art. While art usually hasn’t treated kids with a lot of respect, Mary Cassatt is one of the few artists who portrayed children in her art in an less-restricted manner. So when I saw a poster about an exhibit of her art at the National Gallery, I was eager to go.
What I like the most about Cassatt is that she painted people as they are, not how she wanted them to be. Historically, art has portrayed children as small adults, stuffing them in tiny formal clothes in stiff positions with blank or very serious expressions. (In some medieval art, baby Jesus is outright creepy.) Many of them look like zombie children or possessed dolls. In fact, a critic contemporary to Cassatt said that most artists of the time put mothers and children in “stupid and pretentious poses.”
In contrast, Cassatt – like many of the Impressionists – was interested in painting “real people.” Cassatt’s paintings often capture children’s lack of decorum. In what’s probably her most famous painti
ng, Little Girl on a Blue Armchair, a young girl is dressed in her Sunday best and absolutely sprawled out on the living room furniture. With her dog perched on a nearby chair, she looks out at the viewer with a relaxed but vaguely bored look: “What? I’m comfortable.” From her pose to her expression, she’s the opposite of a proper Victorian lady, but so much like the little girls we know in real life.
Another famous painting, Girl Arranging Her Hair, shows a teenager in her dressing gown, fussing with her long hair. What I found particularly interesting about this one is that Cassatt doesn’t paint her as conventionally attractive. In fact, she’s a little homely. But Cassatt finds beauty in the ordinariness of her face and the task at hand.
The exhibit also displayed a number of her lesser-known pieces, particularly a set of prints done in a Japanese woodcut style. My favorite of these was Maternal Embrace, which 
shows a woman hugging an older infant to her chest. The baby is naked, as if he or she has just come out of the bath. The mother has her arms tightly wrapped around the child, her eyes closed and head resting against the child’s cheek. It captures a moment of deep intimacy, of what I imagine to be a mother contemplating how much she loves and cherishes her child. The baby is big enough to hug tightly but small enough to be vulnerable – perhaps around 4 to 6 months. The print resonated with me, because that was a time I particularly enjoyed with Sprout. He was smiling often and giving real emotional feedback. It captures a moment that truly reflects my lived experience, in a way that art rarely does for me.
Cassatt’s empathy for children was even reflected in her art supplies; the museum had a set of her pastels on display. When she had moved on to other mediums, Cassatt gave them to one of her friend’s daughters. The accompanying plaque quotes the recipient as saying that as a little girl, she had no idea what they were worth, so she just used them to create her own art. I suspect that was exactly what Cassatt intended with the gift.
Seeing these images of children sparked my thoughts about how we portray children today. Children are portrayed more now than in any period of time, between digital cameras, smartphones, Facebook and Instagram. While the mere act of photographing our kids may inspire them to ham it up and be less genuine, I do think that most photos try to depict children’s lived lives, just as Cassatt did. Of course, they usually show our kids’ best side and not all of the whining, but they aren’t trying to turn our kids into people they aren’t.
Instead, I think sometimes where we – and I definitely include myself here – go wrong is how we interpret other people’s photos. It’s so easy to look at other people’s photo sets and forget about the 10 photos they didn’t post where their kid wouldn’t sit still or was hitting their sibling or was complaining about goodness knows what. It’s easy to forget that these are just snapshots into people’s lives and even messy places can look beautiful with the right point of view. We long to have our lives look like other people’s, forgetting that we have our own moments of honest beauty, even if we didn’t have the camera ready at that moment. Or we get mad at other people’s lives being “perfect,” even if they never claimed such a thing. We try to compare our families to fictional people that exist only on a screen. It’s like being mad at the Pinterest moms that do everything – we don’t know the whole story and it isn’t fair to either of us. Instead, we need to extend grace to ourselves and each other, finding art in the ordinary.
Art is just one way to express beauty. When we portray children, we should make it as true to them as possible, but also remember we’ve only captured just one moment of many.
I brought my baby to an art museum last weekend. Specifically, it was the Van Gogh exhibition at the Phillips Collection, which was excellent. And it wasn’t even the first time he had been to an art museum – that was our visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. photography exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery when he was about four months old. (Admittedly, he slept through most of that trip.)
We went in part because I love museums and have since I was a little girl. I was obsessed with the New York State Museum when I was young, but my interest has expanded dramatically since then. In terms of the art world, I’m quite fond of the Impressionists, so I was excited about this exhibit. As Sprout is a quiet, calm baby, I didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t bring him. As it turned out, we weren’t the only parents with the same idea. We saw a number of babies in strollers and carriers. It felt very French, with babies being in a place that was definitely not kid-centric. To me, it demonstrated that our children are an essential part of our lives, but not everything we do is centered around their specific desires. While he’s too little notice it now, I think this is an important lesson for kids to learn. I vividly remember being on a trip as a kid and being bored silly on the day my parents did a wine tour. Even though the other activities were things that we mostly visited for my benefit, that stuck out because I realized that it wasn’t all about me. Although I was annoyed at the time, I’m glad in retrospect that my parents took that day for themselves. There’s something to be said for building character.
Beyond my individual preferences, I do think that visiting the art museum benefitted Sprout. I think he enjoyed seeing all of the colors and swirly patterns in Van Gogh’s work. Visual stimulation is very important early on in childhood and why not use stuff that’s appealing to adults as well? We don’t need Baby Van Gogh if we can see the real thing in person. I may have been imagining things, but he seemed particularly interested in the paintings Van Gogh did of a baby, which happened to be much less cute than him. In another exhibit, he also seemed drawn to a large photograph of a woman breastfeeding a baby and staring fiercely at the camera. I’m not sure if it reminded him of me or just made him hungry.
In terms of the big picture, I want to share a love of learning and museums with Sprout. In my opinion, the best way to build this love is leading by example and visiting these places as a normal part of our everyday lives. We live in the Land of Museums – they should be as much part of his childhood landscape as they are of DC’s geographical one. In fact, a story from a random lady at the museum illustrates the power of this attitude. Smiling at the baby, she said, “I’m 70 now and my mother brought me to my first art exhibit when I was 3 months old. The Rodin exhibit!” Now that’s quite a long-term influence!
Overall, the visit was a really positive experience. No one seemed put off by his presence and people generally seemed charmed that he was there. One even commented, “A little art critic!”
Based on the day, a few recommendations if you’re interested in bringing a baby to a non-kids museum:
1) Leave the stroller at home. We actually brought both the carrier and stroller, hoping to check the stroller at the coat check and put him in the carrier. (He’ll only tolerate the carrier for about an hour, substantially shorter than we planned to be out.) Unfortunately, they didn’t have space for the stroller, so we ended up having to push it around. While the exhibit was spacious enough for it not to be an issue, I still felt bad taking up so much space.
2) Anticipate only being able to see a small part of the museum. I can be a museum completist, but that’s not an option with a small child. We were able to see the entire exhibit because Sprout is observant and doesn’t mind getting pushed around, but the Phillips recommends not trying to see more than five pieces of art with a small child.
3) Keep an eye on the clock. I tend to lose any sense of time, so when Sprout finally started getting a little fussy, it took me a second to realize that he hadn’t eaten for quite a while.
Have you ever brought a baby or very young child to a non-kids museum?