Children's Museum: Promising Start

A new museum may be a part of East Hampton's future: a museum specifically for children. A first small taste may be had at Guild Hall from now through Jan. 11, and a reception is planned for this weekend.

We walked there from the village through falling leaves in the brilliant fading light of autumn, clean and crisp and cold. Once through the doors of Guild Hall we found ourselves in another time, but the same place.

Half the gallery space is devoted to an exhibit of art by the Moran family and half to a detailed response for children. The designers of the exhibit have understood the importance of space and environment, and the domestic Victorian timbre of the Moran paintings is reflected in the children's section.

Inside A Painting

You arrive inside a house. Drawn in by a large reproduction of a local scene (Moran's), you are suddenly in a room that is clearly of residential scale. As you become involved in the activities you step outside the house through openings in a wall sheathed in exterior clapboard to a sunny day.

You pass by diminutive farm stands, bridges over fresh ponds, the ocean beach, and off in the distance reachable by a few steps are the rolling farm fields for you to till.

The low walls of the interior space encourage a natural social flow. The openings, half walls, benches, and columns create enclosures that differentiate events and establish spaces devoted to children's play that are inviting.

Tile Club "Members"

The big inviting picture at the start of this adventure is covered with little doors that open to reveal a lesson behind the image: rocks and trees and houses with cows. Looking around, you might be drawn to imitate members of the once active Tile Club here by decorating a tile using rubber stamps, which have a local motif, and a sepia ink pad.

Over here there are more doors to open revealing images past and present of local street scenes, transport, beach wear, and fishing styles. There are funny old costumes to try on and a place to stick your head onto an old-fashioned body while looking into a wavy reflection suggesting a vision of yourself in the hazy past.

Ivy-Covered Cottage

The bright light draws you through to the gorgeous day outside - don't waste the sunlight hours, it calls. As you look back to orient yourself you find the exterior clapboard walls acknowledging that, yes, you were in a little ivy-covered cottage on Egypt Lane, but the rich produce of this verdant land awaits. I'll take a pound of potatoes, please. What is that digital cash register doing there?

Some more doors open to tell you what can be made from corn, a brightly back-lit bowl of corn chips brings a laugh of surprise every time.

There is a lovely bridge to fish from with all sorts of fish to catch and then release through matching cutouts in the wall behind. The crabs and striped bass make a slippery journey in the wall and return to the sea below the anglers. The sea animal puppets at the beach and the felt figure farm scene complete the tour inside and outside in history in this place.

Somewhat Synthetic

The exhibit is sophisticated if a little too synthetic. It felt as though this might have been a carefully researched and designed exhibit for youngsters originated, imagined, from some place far away. It is correct, it is fun, it is informative, but it isn't here. It seemed generic ye olde Hampton, ersatz East End.

The exhibit has absorbed and regurgitated in homogeneous palatable form the East End experience. It is the Disney-ization of substance.

While I confess to having fun shopping with my son for the perfect rubber potatoes and nectarines, it made me wonder what the cost of the unusually life-like rubber vegetables might be compared to the real things, too familiar to our country kids.

Should Travel

Perhaps this presentation should travel to inner-cities to be seen by children who may never have seen a real apple in a farm stand basket. Unfortunately, there are better places around town to experience old time East Hampton, Mulford Farm just up the road, for instance.

These are our streets and our light, it isn't Florida or Southern California. We really do live here and not only buy but eat those potatoes, catch and eat those fish. Has it really changed that much?

The East End is a peculiar place for children in winter. When the natural world quiets down and becomes less inviting under gales and freezing rain, there is little for children to do outside of the home.

For A Rainy Day

The idea of a place for the younger set to gather with their elders has been floating around for years, complete with poetic maternal visions of a dynamic and interactive environment that could, like this, originate and cultivate exhibits.

Certainly every adult we met at Guild Hall was thrilled to be enjoying the company of their kids in this venerable local institution, to be welcomed to a generously detailed environment given over to and specially conceived for children that will last for a couple of months.

This is more than a place to learn, a place to play, an occupation for a rainy day, however. It is a place to find like-minded souls. Even the children cannot fail to make the connection of place and the little activity room - how are we different? they ask. Perhaps we are not.

Culture Moms

In general local institutions have not risen to the needs of the astonishing numbers of families settling here year-round. This exhibit marks a beginning.

The determined and effective mothers responsible for the Children's Museum of the East End have created something wonderful and have executed it with enormous professionalism. Is this group of women the logical extension of the successful soccer mom: the culture mom?

I am delighted and impressed if a little disappointed that this should have been so long in coming and perhaps over-thought.

What can we wish for in this budding institution? I dream of a place that questions and examines a sense of time, a sense of place, a sense of me, a sense of them, a sense of here and a new awareness of now.

To Be Applauded

On the order of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Mercer collection in Doylestown, and the Liberty Science Center this would be museum as attic, as graveyard, as department store - an archive and a treasury. It would be interactive: a place for the chance encounter of a real kid with a real thing which leads to unforeseen reverberations for both.

The museum would be a guide, almost parental, creating little tours that construct authentic introductions to reality that could, by example, lead to experiences of otherness. The museum acts as a map introducing a sense of locating oneself in both time and place.

I applaud Guild Hall for including this in its schedule. It was fun and didactic: a warm well-lighted space clearly proclaiming the belief that creative, active individuals will grow up in a society that emphasizes learning over teaching.

Inspirational Mix

I hope the children are shown both rooms, the pictures along with the children's space, and get it all mixed up in their minds with the actual family that lived just down the street. Did any child clamor to drive down Egypt Lane after leaving the museum to see the house where Thomas Moran lived in the same way young Japanese flock to Prince Edward Island to be married in the exact spot as the author of "Anne of Green Gables"?

I trust that a permanent place that continues to be thought-provoking and engaging will be created by this dynamic group for the younger crowd in our area.

The alchemical mix of art, place, artifact, and imagination are an experience that we have here in abundance. This is an inspiring encounter that I can only hope will grow to include us all.