Six-year-old Landon Storm thrust his face into a hole where Mona Lisa's mug would normally be. He smiled big for the photo op, and his dad, Dave Harrison of Coon Rapids, took a picture.
A series of other artists' takes on the Mona Lisa lined the adjacent walls of this stand-alone display at the Minnesota Children's Museum. In Andy Warhol's lithograph print "Two Golden Mona Lisas," Warhol duplicates the famous painting, and in Urbaniec Maciej's "Cyrk; Mona Lisa," Maciej reimagines her as a circus performer, to name a few.
But will the real Mona Lisa please stand up? No, because this display in the broader museum exhibition "Framed: Step Into Art" is all about how artists appropriate famous works of art.
"Did you learn about that painting in school, Landon?" Harrison said.
Landon smiled and nodded, then ran off to ride the larger-than-life chicken inspired by Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter's painting "Chicken Hauling Flowers."
Elsewhere, kids gathered around a table in Grant Wood's "Dinner for Threshers," serving each other make-believe meals and pouring "tea" from an empty kettle.
The Minnesota Children's Museum wanted a place where kids could have a chance to touch the art, unlike at traditional art museums where that's forbidden.
"The museum has always been a place where we want adults to be able to say 'Yes,' to their kids," Vice President of External Relations Bob Ingrassia said. "Yes, you can touch. … It's about interacting in a hands-on way, and that's been baked into the DNA of the museum since 1981."
Although the exhibition was created more than a decade ago and toured children's museums across the country, it hasn't been seen in St. Paul since 2011. The five artists whom kids get to know through the show are Americans Grant Wood and John Singer Sargent, Mexican painter Diego Rivera, Black folk artist Clementine Hunter and Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. All of the exhibition text is in English and Spanish.
Art comes to life
On a frigid Friday afternoon, kids and their parents roamed through the various art-turned-play-zone installations. Bennett Diedering, age 2 1/2, of Minneapolis grabbed a pan from inside the tent-come-to-life of Sargent's "Camp at Lake O'Hara" and brought it over to a pretend stove.
"OK, it's morning time, let's go!" he said to his friend. Then he arranged four ears of corn in the pan and carried it over to a pretend campfire, where there was also a scratch-and-smell pad that smelled like burning wood.
His mom, Rachel, watched from the side.
"We do a lot of camping," she said. "He knows."
"I'm making corn for the kids!" Bennett said.
"I think they really like this cloth over the table there," she said, pointing across the room to the three-dimensional experience of Wood's 1934 painting "Dinner for Threshers," where kids can pull up a chair and also put new shirt tops onto the men at the table. (The original painting is on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.)
"Everyone really liked the chicken, too," she said. "Bennett's friend thought the tassels on the chicken, that you use to ride, were a little mustache."
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"Framed: Step Into Art"
Where: Minnesota Children's Museum, 10 W. 7th St., St. Paul.
When: Ends May 7.
Hours: 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat., 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun.
Cost: $16 for ages 1-101, $3 for income-based tickets (must show proof of eligibility, such as EBT, WIC or free/reduced lunch letter).
Info: mcm.org or 651-225-6000.
