Fun hands-on, eye-level activities attract youngsters

Michael H. Hodges / The Detroit News

Time was when taking your little kid to the Detroit Institute of Arts for anything besides crafts workshops was a hardsell. No longer.

A great museum has not only rethought how it presents art, but also how it interacts with its most-valuable constituency -- the next generation.

"After all," says DIA education director Nancy Jones, "the art museum's not a slam-dunk. It's not the zoo."

So the DIA did what so few "adult" institutions ever do: They created cool stuff just for kids.

The centerpiece of this strategy is "Eye Spy!," a sort of DIA scavenger hunt with clues scattered throughout most galleries. Conveniently located at 8-year-old height, each of the 53 "Eye Spy!" labels has a riddle that directs children to a detail on a specific work of art in that very room.

Older kids may go just on that. Younger ones may need to lift the label to see the visual clue beneath.

In the Native American galleries, one clue, "I'm shiny and small / With bumps down my back / In the wild I grab flies with my tongue," points children at a gold frog on a tombstone from the Chirique culture in Central America.

Language throughout is puckish -- for a 1775 painted ostrich egg in the European decorative arts galleries, the label refers to the object's "egg-cellent" base.

Other ideas that adults will applaud include objects kids can actually get their hands on -- like free-standing globes, rather than boring old maps, and "Please Touch Me!" labels. The latter offer children a chance to see what art materials feel like. Or they can "paint" their own Dutch still life on a Velcro board.

There are also three self-directed gallery guides aimed at adults and children, the most amusing of which is "Yikes!," which takes kids on a museum-wide tour of sinister art.

(It starts, appropriately, with Henry Fuseli's 1781 creep-out "The Nightmare.")

Other tours include the sports-oriented "Game Day," and a tour of vistas and landscapes through the ages called "Take a Hike."

Still, museum fatigue inevitably sets in. This is when Jones reminds parents, "Kids always appreciate a stop at the CaféDIA."