Great Art Exhibits to check out with family!

Spring time is an excellent time to go out and enjoy time together in parks and zoos but their are some great indoor exhibits for families to check out as well.

Before going to any museum it is good to have a plan and agenda. Scavenger hunts, research projects and art inspired projects after visits can make visits more meaningful and entertaining.

THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM has a couple exhibits that can excite young minds.
Palatable: Food and  Contemporary Art is a great exhibit for spotting food in art. You can discuss the reasons the food is a part of the composition, what kind of food was used or represented, and later create your own composition using food as a theme. This can mean using collage, painting or creating actual culinary sculptures that can be eaten after created.

Romare Bearden, Family, 1969

Miguel Luciano, Pure Plantainum, 2006
Inside is a rotting plantain that was plated in platinum

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO has the Illusive Eye exhibit is an international survey on Kinetic and Op art. The exhibition offers a broad intellectual context for Op art and geometric abstraction, one that goes against the grain of formalist art history. The selection provides a special focus on artwork from the Americas and features major artists from eighteen countries in Latin America and beyond. 

This is a great exhibit to explore line, shape, movement, illusion and sculpture. Fun projects can be to make your own opt art or mobile. 

More images of this exhibit can be found at http://iamstyleoverfashion.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-illusive-eye.html 

 and at the NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY  Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakes, 1570 - 1900. Beside being a magnificent main branch located in the middle of all the action of the city (42nd street) their early collection of pr a great surprise.
 As stated on their website: Physically demanding and technically challenging, printmaking has often been considered man’s labor. As the Library’s unusual collection by forward-thinking Henrietta Louisa Koenen (1830-1881) demonstrates, engravings, etchings, woodcuts and lithographs executed by female printmakers have been around almost as long as artists started creating prints in the late fifteenth century. From 1848 until 1861, she collected an astonishing array of sheets by women artists from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Executed by experts and amateurs alike, these women pursued their craft as part of larger family workshops, as a means of self-realization and for the thrill of making and sharing pictures created in multiples.
This can lead to a fun print making project that needs foam, a stylus or blunt pencil, paint, paint brush (or brayer and ink) and paper. 

These are just three of many, many exhibitions that are going on in New York City. I suggest always checking the institutions website first and then planning your trip. Happy Museum Visiting!!!! 

ps I plan to add more as I check out new exhibits all year long.