Super Sundays, the third Sunday of every month at the Art Gallery, is where it's at [UPDATE: it's even better now ... see below]. It's geared toward families with kids 12 and under. The Gallery becomes a vibrant, interactive space with workshops and art hunts and drop in art sessions. Aside from the obvious fun of creating mini masterpieces, I love how each activity is so carefully tied to the current exhibitions and installations. It's about learning art through doing it. And the staff are top notch.
This last weekend, we really enjoyed the tree exhibition which was an entire floor of works of art from dozens of artists. There was photography, collage, sculpture, large scale installations, paintings etc and it all related to trees in some way. With a mini clue book in hand we found each of the featured pieces of art. After answering thought provoking questions like "if you were inside that painting and you looked up, what would you see?" a volunteer would give us a piece for our collage. We collected 6 or so pieces and then found our way to the Tree Collage workshop.
This is my straw painting from the workshop. It includes a little nest using the collage items we'd collected:
UPDATE
What used to be on one Sunday per month is now 2 Sundays per month. In addition they have Saturday programming as well, which we have yet to check out ... but are dying to! All the info you need is on their website.
BRUNCH FIRST?
Another thing I like about the Art Gallery is the Gallery Cafe upstairs. I love this place because it's very white-table-cloth-classical-music and a yet reasonably priced, self-serve [cafeteria-style] restaurant. That means no waiting around for the waiter to bring your bill when your precious little bundle is about to have a meltdown. The patio is glorious in the warmer months and great for the kids to roam about a bit. As for food, my standby is the seared tuna niçoise salad.
