Framed: Step into Art

Step inside the framework of famous paintings and experience art like never before in Framed: Step into Art™, opening at Stepping Stones Museum for Children on Monday, January 21, 2013.  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: Step into Art™ continues at Stepping Stones through May 12, 2013.

Visitors enter the special exhibit by stepping through an over-sized frame and instantly become immersed in the worlds created by well-known artists. Each work is re-created as a three-dimensional, sensory, walk-in environment that includes a print of the artist’s original work, as well as important facts about the artist’s life and painting style. Featured paintings in the bi-lingual exhibit include:

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 work 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.

Visitors can curate their own art gallery, as they decide which pieces to exhibit and where to place them.  They can also draw a self portrait at a designated computer station, take part in an art hunt through the exhibit and let their imaginations run wild by creating as many different images as possible at the three-dimensional Pattern Puzzle.

“Framed: Step Into Art™ provides a wonderful opportunity to turn a spark of curiosity and interest in the exhibit into a lifelong appreciation and understanding of art,” said Rhonda Kiest, Executive Director of Stepping Stones Museum for Children. “Art is a valuable tool for expression and understanding.  We hope that exposure to this interactive exhibit will encourage children to make a real and personal connection with art and view it as an important aspect of their lives.”

Framed: Step Into Art™ was created by the Minnesota Children’s Museum for the members of the Youth Museum Exhibit Collaborative (YMEC): Bay Area Discovery Museum, Boston Children’s Museum, Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, Children’s Museum of Memphis, Long Island Children’s Museum, Minnesota Children’s Museum and Stepping Stones Museum for Children.  The exhibit is sponsored locally by Xerox Foundation.