MFA, other art museums catering to schoolchildren
The 80,000 children who visit the Museum of Fine Arts in school groups each year have for decades entered unceremoniously, through a back door and a dingy basement.
That stopped yesterday, when yellow school buses pulled up to the museum's grand Huntington Avenue entrance, and hundreds of students passed through the massive bronze doors into the stone foyer. They were greeted by the merry Frederick MacMonnies sculpture of a bacchante and an infant faun having entirely too much fun (the kids didn't seem to notice); then they walked up the grand staircase lined with marble neoclassical sculptures and potted palms, and into the celestial glory of the rotunda with its domed ceiling and John Singer Sargent's paintings of an idiosyncratic Mt. Olympus.
"We wanted to make a good first impression," said MFA director Malcolm Rogers. "They're really bringing this entrance alive," he added, as he played the part of the calm at the center of the storm, with hundreds of children swarming around him before breaking into small groups for focused tours.
An archival photo of children arriving at the MFA in 1923 demonstrates that such visitors weren't relegated to a dank basement entrance in those days. For now, they're once again welcome at the front door.
The MFA's new welcome for school groups is part of a nationwide move among art museums to entice audiences -- and patrons -- of the next generation.
The once-a-year docent-led sprint through the galleries is being replaced by more sophisticated strategies. Children are being invited to write labels, dress up in the period costume of a particular painting, and act as docents themselves.
In conjunction with the MFA's current "Gauguin Tahiti" show, high school students are giving tours to other teenagers, and reporters from school newspapers are writing reviews.
When public schools in less affluent communities lose their art curriculums because of funding cuts, museums are filling in, with increasingly inventive programs that go beyond the stopgap.
What are students really getting out of this? We may find out. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has won a three-year, $700,000 grant from the US Department of Education to research what elementary-school students actually learn from a multiple-visit program that involves three trips to the Gardner -- and three trips by Gardner staff to the school -- during the course of a year.
Peggy Burchenal, the Gardner's curator of education and public programs, says the study will focus on "how kids develop critical thinking skills, and how they can use the museum environment, which is rich. The authenticity of real things roots kids in the reality of history in a way nothing else can."
At the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Susan Diachisan, manager of interpretive programs, launched an initiative called "Teen to Screen" last September. A dozen high school students from Waltham have each chosen a work in the museum's sculpture park to study. They'll make short videos about their choices, and the videos will go on the DeCordova's website, www.decordova.org, this summer.
The Waltham students are "learning about careers in museums, about what people do in the arts besides being an artist," Diachisan says, citing the case of a student coming into the program who didn't know what "curator" meant. Now she does.
Museums that show the work of living artists face the challenge of communicating the sometimes inscrutable messages of contemporary art, balanced by the opportunity to have the artists themselves involved. At the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, that has meant some extraordinary collaborations, with Phillips students and those from nearby public schools working with a roster of A-list international artists, alumnus Frank Stella among them.
Museums are emphasizing sustained student contact with art and artists -- not just the annual field trip. The Institute of Contemporary Art, for instance, has an 8 1/2-month video program called "Fast Forward," designed for a small group of Boston high school students who "have to be motivated and committed," says ICA director of education Ena Fox, "because of limits on space and equipment."
The students visit the ICA once a week to work with various invited artists, learning all aspects of the field, right through to production and editing. The videos they create are shown twice a year in the ICA theater, on a Thursday evening, when admission to the institute is free. (The next screening is May 6.)
The ICA's "Vita Brevis" program of temporary public art also has a student component. Recently, Japanese artist Niho Kozuru worked with a group of 11th-graders from the Boston Arts Academy for two intense weeks. Kozuru makes cast-rubber forms: She introduced the students to her unusual material, and then they made their own versions, with memory and dreams as the core subject matter.
The translucent, amber-colored results will be shown at the school in May, and will be accessible to the public during school hours.
At Harvard's Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, works by fifth-grade students from the Captain Samuel Brown School in Peabody are on the walls through April 22 in "Fabulous Fakes." Forgery training it's not; it's training the eye and hand through the time-honored means of copying the masters -- Picasso, Degas, and others, in this case. These days, that represents a radical turnaround from educational theories that copying might stifle students' creativity.
At the Fuller Museum of Art in Brockton, children are being recognized as collectors. The Fuller is inviting Brockton kids from ages 8 to 12 to bring their collections -- baseball cards, sea shells, whatever -- to the museum on April 25, for consideration for inclusion in "Kids Collect," at the museum from May 8 through July 25.
Lest this seem an empty PR ploy, remember that cosmetics-empire heir Leonard Lauder began collecting Japanese postcards at age 10 -- and the results of his ongoing engagement with that unexpected form now make up a delightful exhibition at the MFA.
What's next: children as museum trustees?
Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs on Wednesdays. 
