[dropcap style=”1″ size=”3″]T[/dropcap]he New Children’s Museum (NCM) is preparing to serve up an extraordinary sensory experience this fall. The exhibition, Feast!: The Art Of Playing With Your Food, will be a gastronomically inspired educational playground that will stretch out across the street to include a garden in the park area. While none of the exhibits will necessarily be edible, NCM seeks to infuse young minds with several concepts related to food including healthy eating, exercise, sustainability, and family traditions via art, play, and interaction. In addition to collaborations with talented artists from around town and across the country, local chefs and businesses are also involved on several projects for additional flavor throughout the exhibition.
Photos below are of the current exhibition and models of the upcoming FEAST! including the new arrivals… CHICKENS in the coop.
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Here is a quick taste of only some of what to expect on the menu when Feast! arrives:
Sound Kitchen: A hybrid kitchen/recording studio in which children of all ages can compose a song using innovative instruments designed from common kitchen wares and appliances. Families are encouraged to work collaboratively to create original compositions that they can mix, record and email to themselves when complete.
Enchanted Fruits: An inflatable landscape for visitors to explore. This space will encourage highly physical play, and will celebrate the joy of food and eating with colorful, imaginary food-themed characters. The use of oversized food imagery will transform a viewer’s experience of a familiar object or by playing with size and scale.
Wobbleland: Developed especially for NCM’s youngest visitors, the developmental needs of toddlers is addressed through an immersive experience set inside an oversized kitchen sink filled with massive scraps of food, each designed to facilitate a toddler-appropriate hands-on activity. Children and families will rock on a cantaloupe see-saw, climb beneath celery arches, and push a kiwi stroller through the space.
Mol_d: Don’t let the name gross you out because this is pretty amazing. Visitors will build structures with a very unconventional material—mushrooms. Featuring over 1000 custom fabricated building blocks made entirely from fungus, and using the technique of cultivating reishi mushrooms and forming them into molds that have been perfected over nearly 10 years of research and experimentation, the artist will fabricate blocks especially for NCM’s visitors that can be endlessly reconfigured using their interlocking design. The installation space will also feature furniture made from mycelium, demonstrating the strength of this remarkable materials that is nontoxic, fireproof and mold-and-water-resistant.
5PM and Nature Matching System: At the center of 5PM, or “five poop machines,” according to the artist, is a chicken coop which will house five chickens installed on NCM’s outdoor terraces. In conjunction with the outdoor garden and compost heap, 5PM will illustrate the food cycle in a highly tangible way for visitors.
Through the NMS-Nature Matching System, the artist will realize a large scale mural composed of uniform squares of 88 pantone colors, each matched to the color of a particular fruit or vegetable from the garden. The message behind NMS is to “Remember to take your daily dose of color.” NMS has been realized in a variety of formats, from placemats, murals and custom designed fruit stickers identifying the shades collected, to workshops using the related fruits and vegetables in creative recipes.
Food Truckin’: Children will assemble, pack, and ship food products using customizable vehicles in order to learn about food production and distribution.
Urban Aqualoop: This engaging interactive installation will integrate natural cycles with real food production infrastructure in an innovative form that invites exploration. The soaring, curving structure will be a creative illustration a sustainable, closed-loop food production system; a functional, aquaponic fish and vegetable farm. Additionally, Urban Aqualoop will offer unexpected vantage points for viewing plant and fish life, as well as spaces to play, touch and relax within the installation. Daily feeding and harvesting in Urban Aqualoop will be a participatory experience for visitors.
[box title=”DETAILS” color=”#90bad5″]Visitors will be able to dig in starting on October 13 with free admission from noon to 4pm. For more information on the exhibit as well as the upcoming gala to support NCM, visit www.thinkplaycreate.org[/box]
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