The wet Sunday afternoon museum experience: in your best (therefore most uncomfortable) clothes, being hushed through long rooms by an adult who has your tiny hand in a vice-grip hold, straining to see "works of art" way above your head - with the occasional stop for some awed silence. Touch it? You're dead! Ah, but that was then, and things are different now. These days museums and art galleries increasingly offer education programmes and even family events which are actually great fun. Helen O'Donoghue is the senior curator of the education and community programmes at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, Dublin, where "Explorer 1" - no, it's not a NASA mission - has just started its autumn term.
"Between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Sunday afternoons, families are welcome to drop into the `Explorer Unit' and stay as long as they like, moving around the gallery chatting about the work, talking to one of the team of artists here involved with Explorer 1, or making work which is a response to something they've seen," O'Donoghue says. The unit is now based in the gallery itself rather than, as some time previously, outside in one of the studios. Mum, dad and the kids literally get down on the gallery floor with art materials supplied by the museum and do whatever they like.
"Well," laughs O'Donoghue, "within reason. We've no wet materials like clay or paint.
"But we put cushions on the floor and families work away. We also have chairs if people prefer to sit on them. And for adults who would rather not make art, we have a whole range of books they can read while the children work."
Internationally there is a similar trend towards making galleries and museums places children and their parents love to come and visit. This museum has been running family programmes since the early 1990s.
"Sundays have become family days in museums across the States and in Britain," O'Donoghue says. "When we first opened here in we were running programmes for children. The adults would drop the kids off and wait for them, but usually in the cafe. Some would ask if they could sit at the back, and gradually the adults began to get involved.
"Increasingly parents would talk about how they really wanted their children to explore art, but they didn't know how to facilitate them. "We started off running family programmes in a studio space during the holidays. Then we hired a researcher who looked at developments internationally and came up with the idea of having something which was more frequent, and gallery-based. This year families come and work with our team of artists, inside the gallery."
AS FAMILIES ARRIVE, they can come to the unit and have a chat with one of two artists who are there each week. The children get their "Explorer" badge, and a magnifying glass, "which seems to give them a wonderful feeling of being an explorer in a foreign land", says O'Donoghue.
The purpose of an initiative like Explorer 1 is not simply to offer families an opportunity to learn about the work in the museum. It is intended as a more of an all-encompassing encounter.
"We would be hoping families would find the gallery is also stimulating in a social sense," O'Donoghue says. "Self-directed learning is the focus, with the museum as a learning centre. So families are encouraged to move through the space in their own way, at their own pace.
"It breaks down that old, rigid sense of having to go a certain route, stopping at a certain point. "This helps create an intimacy with the gallery. Conversations can spin off easily, people tend to want to spend more time here, and we find a sense of community builds up among the families, from all walks of life, who have dropped in. They can also go out and visit the artists in their studios, or go out for a walk through the grounds."
The programme has proved very, very popular. "On a busy Sunday we could have hundreds of people coming through, but people stop off in the unit, move out, come back - there is a lot of coming and going. "The artist with the unit is sort of a reference point for the families, but they look around the gallery on their own terms. Sometimes they have a question about a piece for the artist, sometimes one of the parents is familiar with some work and shares the information with the artist, and it is not uncommon for the children to come up with a particularly interesting idea about what they see.
"Exploring an art work isn't just about the historical facts; children discover that it can be explored emotionally as much as intellectually and that art is something which can be experienced in a more sensual way."
