Tours for Fours

We took ARR to MoMA yesterday--squeaking in under the deadline before he's too old for "Tours for Fours." (They've got other family programs, for 5-10 and 11-14, but I don't think he's got the patience yet for the older kids' program.) They do a great job! Our theme was "Lines", and we looked at a bunch of art for different kinds of lines and drew our own lines. We guessed which of four abstract pieces represented which season. (This was a little too easy for ARR--the seasons were scrawled in the paintings. In Italian, mind you, but the cognate for autumn is close enough that he could figure it out. I don't think they expected the kids to be able to read, let alone read terrible handwriting in a foreign language, when they planned this activity. We looked at wire sculptures and made our own wire sculpture. It was a lot of fun. Free fun. And then they gave us a family pass to come back for free. The MoMA education staff is BRILLIANT.

We spent maybe another 20 minutes in the galleries before we'd had enough. ARR was underwhelmed by "Waterlilies" - a little too placid for him, I suspect. He liked Matisse's "Dance". His least favorite was "Starry Night," which he declared was "boring" because he'd seen it before. (On Daddy's tie. Apparently authenticity is not a priority at the moment.)

They've also got an awesome Art Lab in the education wing, which we easily could have spent at least another half an hour at, but we were hungry and it was time for lunch. (Xi'an Famous Foods noodles - just as good as the hype suggests.)