Celebrating Fifty-Five Years of Museum Family Spaces
Julia Forbes dives into the history of family spaces at the High Museum of Art as we celebrate the anniversary of our dedicated interactive space.
By Julia Forbes, Senior Head of Institutional Research, High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art has had a dedicated interactive space for families to learn, play, and explore since 1968. Over that time, we have created ten family gallery installations. As we celebrate fifty-five years of delighting Atlanta’s families, let’s look back at how we got here.
In October of 1968, the High introduced its first dedicated space for families called Color/Light/Color (1968–1971). The space explored the nature, properties, and uses of color. In a press release from 1969 or 1970, Gudmund Vigtel (museum director, 1963–1991) said, “My proudest accomplishment to date is the Junior Activities Center established within the museum . . . children are the art audiences of the future. The more knowledgeable they are, the greater the dialog possible between the community and the museum.”
In those early years, the High was housed in a red brick building, where the Memorial Arts Building stands today (you can still see its remnants on the Peachtree Street side of the building near the entrance). During that time, there were five installations of the Junior Activities Center: following Color/Light/Color came Shapes (1971–1974), The City (1974–1978), Children in America (1978–1979), and finally Spaces and Illusions (1979–1983).
As the High grew, so did the scale and excitement around the family space. For the opening of the new Richard Meier–designed building (now the Stent Family Wing), a team came together to create a show-stopping installation for families. Housed in the lower level of the new museum, with a huge eyeball looking out over Peachtree Street, Sensation (1983–1988) lived up to its name and caused a huge sensation throughout Atlanta. It focused on the five senses and allowed visitors to interact with sculptures that related to seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, and tasting. The space included artworks from the High’s collection as well as interactive sculptures commissioned for the project. The exhibition explored how the arts engage and enlarge our senses, how technology and the media act as extensions of the senses, and how different experiences and points of view affect our perceptions.
Spectacles (1988–1993) was a series of room environments by eight internationally acclaimed artists including Robert Morris, Barry Le Va, and Beverly Buchanan. Each installation focused on a different theme. Atlanta artist Martin Emanuel dealt with the elements of light and color through a neon light sculpture, while Robert Morris’s mirrored maze addressed ideas of line and illusion. In each area, children could explore creativity and the elements of art, focusing on the components artists use to create works of art like ideas, materials, line, color, space, illusion, and light. Both Sensation and Spectacles still evoke gleeful excitement in the voices of adults who describe the fun they had there as children.
The family space moved to its current location by the early 1990s. The first space on the main level of the museum was called the Visual Arts Learning Space (or VALS; 1993–2003) and included original artwork from the museum’s collection along with labels containing insights, clues, experiments, visuals, and facts about the artworks. Visitors were encouraged to look closely, compare, and reconsider their preconceptions about art. In the center of the gallery, they could work like an artist alone or in groups while four computer stations offered additional ways to experience color, line, light, and composition.
With the 2005 expansion of the High, designed by architect Renzo Piano, the family space became the Greene Family Learning Gallery. The first installation (2005–2018) focused on five activity areas based around creative play and rooted in the High’s collection. This space was dedicated to a free-form style of creative play for toddlers to ten-year-olds. An open-space plan, the gallery comprised five hands-on activity areas — “Building Buildings,” “Transforming Treasure,” “Making a Mark,” “Sculpting Spaces,” and “Telling Stories” — inspired by some of the most popular objects in the museum’s collection.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the High’s commitment to families, the Greene Family Learning Gallery was completely redesigned with all-new interactive environments. We took this opportunity to reenvision our relationship with Atlanta’s families. Our goal was to make the High an essential place for our community, where children and adults could engage together in informal learning, intergenerational communication, and play. The High’s mantra of growth, inclusivity, collaboration, and connectivity, adopted in 2015, guided our work, and a critical step in our inclusivity was inviting our community to join us in this effort. We sought out experts from around Atlanta who work in different areas of education, including early learning, design thinking, accessibility, and serving people with disabilities, to brainstorm with us to create the 2018 Greene Family Learning Gallery.
The new space expanded to include a second room directly across the hall, doubling its previous footprint. The original Greene Family Learning Gallery space is “CREATE,” a bright and open studio devoted to developing young visitors’ art-making abilities and centered on the creative process. The expansion space across the hall is “EXPERIENCE,” a deeply immersive gallery that enables visitors to explore what art means, how it feels, and where it can take us. Each gallery space features a quiet space with activities designed for reflection and a chance to get away from the noisier, more active main rooms, as well as an area specifically for babies and toddlers.
If you’d like to explore the Greene Family Learning Gallery, access is included in general admission during museum hours (exceptions are listed on our website)! And to learn more about my experiences and research around creating meaningful spaces for families, check out the book I cowrote with Marianna Adams, Family Spaces in Art Museums: Creating Curiosity, Wonder, and Play.
