MuMo: a mobile museum for children

What a wonderful project this is! Conceived by Ingrid Brochard, entrepreneur, art collector and philanthropist, MuMo is a traveling contemporary art museum especially for children aged 6 through 12. The project is the first major undertaking of her non-profit foundation, L'Art à l'Enfance.

Designed by New Jersey-based architect Adam Kalkin, the museum consists of a shipping container engineered to magically unfold and pop up like a Transformer toy, topped off with a giant inflatable pink bunny sculpture, courtesy of Paul McCarthy.

Kalkin's preliminary sketch for MuMo.

MuMo at a schoolyard in Cameroon

The museum was assembled in Liverpool in the spring of  2011, and from there was shipped across the channel to France. It began its journey to schoolyards throughout France last fall, and is now traveling to elementary schools in Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire. It will return to France in the fall of this year, with a fully-booked tour schedule through the spring of 2013.

There are 15 internationally recognized artists featured in the museum, including Lawrence Weiner, Nari Ward, Paul McCarthy, Ghada Amer and Maurizio Cattelan. 

Children enter the museum in small groups of 14...no parents or teachers allowed! They are, however, accompanied by a child psychologist, who travels with the exhibition, and trains additional local adult mediators to assist.  In a recent interview with ArtInfo,  Brochard stated that at first she had wanted the children to explore the museum with no adults whatsoever. "But I was afraid that they would miss certain things or that they wouldn't take their time. The idea of guidance is important, as long as the child can speak freely and be listened to. It came down to shedding the academic habits and structure that teachers enforce. I didn't choose (psychologist) Donatella Caprioglio because she's a therapist but because she knows how to listen to children, because she respects their freedom," Brochard said. "I want to avoid at all costs having any authoritarian aspect to the visit."

After the visit, children make their own artwork, and Caprioglio and the mediators conduct a "café" to discuss the experience with the undoubtedly disappointed and frustrated parents and teachers, who are able only to experience the museum vicariously through their children's eyes and ears.  I love how this project turns the traditional pedagogical hierarchy upside down, and allows children space for creative exploration and critical thinking, on their own terms. In the artists selected for the exhibition, the curators avoid any dumbing-down or pandering to adult notions of what children are capable of appreciating, understanding or enjoying. Also on MuMo's website is some charming documentary footage of children's reactions the art they've just seen: one small boy in Cameroon is positively giddy about the experience, declaring Ghada Amer's work, his favourite in the exhibition, to be "Magnifique!...I've never seen anything like that before!".  What he has never seen before is a depiction of two people kissing, highlighting the cross-cultural exploration of similarity and difference that is at the core of this project.  I hope a full-length documentary about MuMo is in the works.

From MuMo's website, here is a short video clip about how the project started, with some interesting commentary from a few of the artists involved. Even if you don't speak French, you'll get the idea...and of course, the American architect and artists speak English.  Lawrence Weiner's comments about the importance of art the psychological development of children are spot-on.

The following excerpts from an interview with Ingrid Brochard (conducted by Françoise Claire Prodhon, via l'Art à l'Enfance) give a fuller sense of Brochard's philosophy and guiding principles:

Why do you wish to set up this project?
Ingrid Brochard : This project is part of a very personal thought process. In my eyes, art, or rather "the arts" in their widest sense: they have the power to open eyes on the world and the realm of emotions, they help us to get through life and its hardships. This is probably the observation that led me to think of a project that would help underprivileged children, or at least those who do not have access to art.

It's a charity with a humanitarian vocation. How do you plan to carry it out ?
This project is designed for the children of Europe, Africa, Asia, South America… It can be implemented with orphanages, hospitals and schools. It will take on the form of a travelling museum that will get to the children in places that are sometimes very remote. The idea is to provide them with a special moment during which they'll have to confront the creative process. But it will also create opportunities to share with the artists during workshops and performances.

What are the guiding principles of the project and how does it work?
The interventions can take on various forms. One of its aspects is the Mobile

Museum, but there are artists who design a project with a specific target that doesn't require them to go on location. For example, Florence Doléac, the designer, designed the blanket-transitional object project for us, which targets small children at an orphanage who don't really have any toys of their own. Another example: Lawrence Weiner is currently setting up the project of a book designed by artists for the children, which will be handed out to the children with the help of Libraries Without Borders.
I talked about L'Art à L'Enfance with many artists, and they all tend to appreciate that type of experience that's outside of the usual framework of contemporary creation, and in which there are no commercial stakes.

What do you mean by that?
I have first-hand experience with the world of contemporary art and its market, the strategic and economic stakes that pervade it. I'm not criticizing, but that's not what I'm looking for… Art is a tool of the mind, and by balancing our emotions, it transforms our outlook on the world, and that's what I wish for these children.

Brian Cox, actor, on language development!

Brian Cox teaches 30-month-old Theo a bit of Shakespeare. (first seen at boingboing)


Added on Feb 11:

I did not have time add comments to this clip when I originally posted it as one of my occasional offerings on creativity, language and memory development.

Theo is a remarkable, natural talker, but I can guarantee you, without ever having met his parents, that he is also benefiting from an environment in which adults speak to him all the time. I'll bet they don't use baby talk, and that they listen to him carefully, and patiently encourage him him to try again when he is not being understood. They don't finish his sentences for him. I'll also bet that there is lots of rhyming word play, nursery rhymes, and songs with gestures. And books.

Babies need to be spoken to from birth. If you watch carefully, you may occasionally have the feeling that even a very young infant is making fleeting attempts to imitate your gestures. You are not imagining this: it is the precursor of speech. By 6 months, it becomes obvious to the adults in a baby's life that babies are very social little critters. They love to imitate hand gestures, facial expressions, and the melodic contours of the language they hear. Older toddlers get joy (and social props) from imitating, as can clearly be seen in Theo's case.

Children do develop at different rates, of course, but they are often smarter and more creative than we realize...we just don't always know what they are trying to express, and sometimes we don't have the patience to truly observe.

If you have a little one in your life, please don't think that Theo's performance is a typical benchmark! I posted the clip because it is inspiring to see a little one and an adult so thoroughly engaged with each other, and mutually enjoying a brief dose of an activity a bit more creatively challenging than "Barney" or "Doodlebops".

If you do have worries that your child is lagging in language development, here is a useful developmental chart.

Never Too Early

One more installation in my series of posts pertinent to arts education, this time from the tenderest end of the spectrum (age-wise, anyway). In a fabulous send-up of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", Maggie Simpson, whilst pursuing her studies at "Mediocri-Tots Daycare Center", gets punished for being creative. It all works out in the end.

Neurodevelopment of Drawing Ability in Children

I have had a long standing interest in the development of drawing skills in young children (from a neuropsychological perspective). Of course, children vary widely in talent, creativity, willingness to take risks, and so on, but there are some very interesting and predictable developmental stages which can be tracked through children's drawings, and which reflect what is going on at the level of brain development.

The Canadian Society for Education through Art maintains an archive of school children's art produced between 1930 to 1995, some examples of which are available in an on-line gallery. The documentation supplied is not the best (ages, dates, names of the young artists are often missing, the wrong captions are attached to some images, and the archive seems to have come to a crashing halt in 1995). Nonetheless, the archive is a potential treasure trove of data for researchers interested in cognitive development, in trends in art education, and the impact of arts education on subsequent academic achievement and vocational attainment. In a previous post, I wondered about what influence the "Kate Bush experience" had on the kids in a 1981 "Razzmatazz" studio audience, and similarly, I wonder about what has become of some of the students whose art is documented in the CSEA archive. Much of the work is wonderful, and reflects not only nascent talent on the part of the children, but the influence of dedicated and inspiring teachers.

Art produced by children between the ages of 6 and 12 provides a window into a very interesting period of neurological and cognitive development. Of course, drawing ability improves developmentally along with eye-hand co-ordination, fine motor skill, kinaesthetics etc., but what is most fascinating is the way in which children's drawing ability shows us something about the developmental progression from a "modular" brain to an "integrative" brain, as the frontal lobes develop and as interhemispheric and intrahemispheric connections are reinforced and refined.

I've pulled a few examples from the CSEA archive to illustrate.


Peter, age 6, 1976, British Columbia. (felt pen)
Peter's drawing is schematic and very verbal/analytic in nature. His drawing represents what he "knows", not what he "sees". Element by element, he documents what is important to him in the scene, as if following a list of key words or concepts. Drawing at this stage seems to be a very language-mediated activity. In the scene as he saw it, for instance, the electrical outlet would have been behind the presents and hence, not visible. But to Peter, it is a very important element, and so he includes it in his drawing.


Ken Kranrod, age 8, 1977, Alberta (pencil)
Ken's drawing is very accomplished. The detail is fantastic, and each element in his drawing is a little masterpiece. However, he is not fully out of the schematic stage. While the detail is rich and far more developed than that of the 6 year old above, Ken has not quite crossed the threshold of drawing what he sees: rather, he is representing what he knows and what is important to him when he thinks about a circus. (I love the swishy action-marks he's put in to give a sense of motion to the bear's dumbells!) Perspective, size of the elements, depth of field: none of this is developed in the overall composition. In fact, the elephant appears to be standing on the bear's head. The elephant and the hippo are also drawn in a very different, cartoon-like style, and demonstrate foreshortening in a manner that is not evident elsewhere. I wonder if these were copied from one of those "how to draw animals" books that are so beloved by children at this age, as their desire to produce representational and realistic drawings for a time trumps their joy in unfettered self-expression. By way of anecdotal finding, most kids seem to go through such a stage, although I am not aware of research specific to this observation.


Lynne Dunsmuir, age 10, 1970, British Columbia (oil pastel)
At age 10, Lynne is starting draw what she sees in a more realistic, representational manner without resorting to cartoon tricks and techniques. Her drawing is less about the disparate elements of what "makes a dog", and more about integrating categorical knowledge with real experience. At age 10, she is on the cusp of a period of tremendous frontal lobe development. She's really captured "dogness" in this drawing, because her brain now has far greater integrative capacity. Stated simply, she is more able to integrate what her left hemisphere "labels" with what her right hemisphere "sees".


A. Wallace, age 12, (Year?) New Brunswick ("paint")
A.Wallace has talent, no doubt about that. She (or he) is entering a much more mature stage of neurocognitive development. Those frontal lobes are really starting to work for her! She is in a watershed period for the development of abstract thinking, flexible problem solving, and increasing capacity for empathy, delay of gratification and moral judgment: these are all related to frontal lobe maturation (which will continue on through her late teens and even early twenties). These are all highly complex and integrative cognitive functions, and are more or less unique to humans, as is the making of art.

My apologies to colleagues and readers who may object to my oversimplification of the neuroscience involved. The point I want to make overall is that between the ages of 6 and 12, a great deal is happening in a child's cognitive and neurological development, and it is happening very rapidly. Opportunities to make art, and to be taught skills of "looking" as well as "making" should not be considered a mere recreational frill or therapeutic outlet for kids in school (although that's good, too!). Evidence is mounting that training in visual literacy and in making art may literally change brain development, by promoting and enhancing connections and feedback loops between various brain regions. (This has been studied fairly extensively in the case of music). The child's neurodevelopmental stage affects their art, and conversely, the practise of art may well affect brain development.

(related posts here, and here and here)

Kate Bush Talks to Kids About Making Art

Another post on the general topic of art and education. Here is a clip from the early 80's British TV show "Razzmatazz" featuring a sweet and sincere Kate Bush talking to kids about the art, music and choreography involved in making a music video.

"I'm very lucky because my interests are actually my work, and in so many ways, any interest I have can become a part of my work...that's the wonderful thing about art...anything you do can then become your work... just keeping your mind open for all these things. It's really fun. Life becomes work."

I wonder what these children went on to do in their lives. They seem so attentive, and I cannot help but think that this experience must have been influential.

Speaking of which: Kate Bush's work would appear to have been an influence on Marcel Dzama and his skating ghosts as well. And a good influence, it is.




(video clip via, via)

Play is Child's Work

Related to yesterday's discussion of the serious play underlying Cybele Young's art, I've posted this video clip, because it vividly illustrates how important it is to a child's development to have freedom to explore and play on his own terms. I know the creators of the clip intended it as a bit of humour, but when I watch it, I feel as if I can literally hear this infant's neurons clicking, grinding, firing and connecting as he gets busy with his work. As it turns out, the infant in this video is the son of a young Quebec photographer, Francis Vachon.


via