Summer is an exciting time for new art, and museums all around the country are welcoming its citizens to punctuate their sun bathing and water-sports regimen with some high culture. Yet, bringing kids to see art can sometimes feel like a chore. A few years ago, we read one of our childhood favorites to the kids, inspiring our best trip to a museum, ever! The book is "From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler," and tells the story of two kids who run away from home and wind up hiding out in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The deliciously taboo notion that kids could stowaway in a museum (without their parents) thrilled our children as much as it thrilled us a generation ago. We were inspired to plan our own stowaway adventure at a local Art Museum. The kids found a bed they could sleep in, a place to stow their overnight bags, and a fountain in which to bathe. We hope that you will follow our lead and start your summer with an off-beat, kid-friendly art adventure -- by pretending to mimic the story's clever premise, we are pretty sure that your kids will discover that a museum is much more fun than they'd thought. Oh -- and, they might fall in love with a piece of art along the way.
Click here for more information about The Hideaways, a television movie starring Isabella Rossellini, based on the beloved E. L. Koenigsberg book.
