Learning Experienced

Dip a brush in paint as thick and red as tomato paste and feel the slap-glide of it over a smooth surface; stir and mash a pulpy mess and watch it turn into paper; use your body to project an animated film; design a desk, a dress, your own 3-D cyberspace persona--even a prosthetic limb.

In the process, begin to see how emotion and ideas can be captured in ink and crayon, cloth and cardboard, metal and wood. Discover that art-making and art-observing can be just plain fun, or that they can stir the senses, spark inspiration, enlarge the world.

Welcome to the Children’s Museum/Museo de los Ninos in San Diego.

During the last seven years, this 16-year-old institution has been transformed into one of the top children’s museums in the country. Its prime mover: executive director Robert L. Sain. A visionary by all accounts, Sain did something unusual, some might say quirky, when he came on board: He made art and artists, architects and designers the heart and soul of this kids’ realm.

Under Sain’s tenure, the museum has blossomed as a site for interactive experimentation in “learning through the arts.” Sain recruited artists at all levels of renown, child development experts, historians, law enforcement and health officials, futurists, computer scientists--you name it--to continually define the needs and interests of the museum audience. Those definitions determined the museum’s arts-based exhibitions and installations.

The exhibitions have been further shaped by how the audience--children, teenagers, parents--react to them.

The museum soon began attracting attention outside San Diego; one major art institution in particular sat up and took notice.

“When I walked through the doors of the San Diego Children’s Museum,” said Stephanie Barron, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s senior curator of contemporary art and vice president of education and public programming, “I was seeing [what] we had been talking about hoping to create.”

LACMA, wrestling with its own need to become meaningful to a wider range of visitors, especially children and young people, decided that Sain was key to its own evolution and made him an offer he couldn’t resist.

As of Sept. 1, Sain will spearhead LACMALab, a major new think tank and laboratory initiative, working in conjunction with curatorial and educational staff and expanding on his innovative, talent-pooling, experimental approach. Backing up his mandate to serve children and families is the new $3-million endowment of the Boone Children’s Gallery at the LACMA West annex, from the family of museum trustee George Boone.

“What the Boone endowment has done is to give us the resources to experiment and to fail and to apply the successes,” said Andrea Rich, LACMA president and CEO. “Very few museums think in those terms. Bob will have the ability to experiment with our own vast permanent collection as well as with artists and what they can contribute to this overall perspective on youth.”

“LACMA is saying: ‘What do children need, what do families need?’ ” Sain said. “And when you figure that out, how can that become embedded and infuse the institution? While it starts out with a child focus, it can have a far broader impact.

“When you have every museum on the planet saying, ‘Oh, my God, we can’t make our collections accessible,’ it’s self-evident that this is a smart thing, a natural thing to do, at an institution with 4,000 years of history and 110,000 objects in a growing collection,” he said.

“Yet there’s never really been to my knowledge a major American encyclopedic institution that would try this kind of thing. That’s the part that’s so compelling.”

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Artists will be front and center at LACMALab. As director, Sain believes that their participation is essential to giving children, teenagers, college students, parents and grandparents meaningful opportunities for art-making and for creative dialogues with the museum’s collections.

“Here’s this extraordinary amount of art,” he said. “Why not turn to the people who, every morning when they wake up, are in the business of making art, to be the bridge, the facility, the link?”

Sain asks as much of the museum and himself as he does of the artists: With a 20-year-plus tour of duty in museum development and marketing, including stints at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, he is driven by a belief that it is essential to consider a museum’s role in the community, its obligations and the nature of the relationship between it, the audience, the art and artists.

At its core, the process “is about listening, finding out what people think, whether it’s the 5-year-old, the grandparent, the internationally distinguished artist or the young emerging artist,” he said.

Audience reaction will be the litmus test. “That’s the juice, ultimately. LACMALab will be about ideas, the power of ideas, but at the heart of all these ideas, it boils down to the people. It’s making the institution invisible and putting the focus on the art, the artist and the audience.”

Not so incidentally, he wants to dispel the notion that only a certain kind of person can go to a museum.

“All that stuff goes out the window.”

Since LACMALab is planned to be just that--a laboratory for experimentation--it’s “a new animal” with few specifics yet. Sain’s first comprehensive project will complement LACMA’s major exhibition “Made in California,” opening in October 2000.

So, to get some idea of why LACMA has committed such significant resources to Sain’s recruitment, you need only visit the airy Children’s Museum/Museo de los Ninos: It was Sain who insisted that the museum be renamed to reflect the border communities the museum serves. Formerly an old downtown industrial warehouse, the space has been transformed with color and light by noted San Diego-based artist Patricia Patterson.

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Sain, 51, a big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a bristly crew cut and a ready smile, propels his visitors in the wake of his unself-conscious enthusiasm, moving comfortably among noisy, happily occupied kids.

He tells of the time a little boy excitedly “discovered” canvas, yelling over the crowd to his mother that he had to “get some of this stuff” to paint on at home.

He points out how museum-goers slather paint onto a real ’52 Dodge pickup, inside and out, creating a work in progress: The truck’s form is gradually blurring under years of drippy red, purple, orange and yellow layers.

He introduces the irresistible delights of “Mi Casa Es Tu Casa/My House Is Your House,” a virtual-reality fun house with two cyberspace entrances, one in San Diego and one in a museum in Mexico. Children on both sides of the border interact in real time by becoming 3-D characters of their own design.

He shows where the museum’s new public charter school convenes, attended by 30 third- and fourth-graders, who get art with their academics: Their first assignment was to design their own desks. Some might say they’re lucky kids. Sain says, “The beauty of this is what kids can do for museums; we’ve got 30 free consultants here every day.”

He watches adults and children going down an enclosed 70-foot “animation” slide and confesses to doing it himself more times than he can remember.

The slide, created by Walt Disney Imagineering’s Lisa Krohn, uses the motion of the slider’s body to project video images overhead. It’s part of a multilayered “Design Worlds/Diseno Mundos” installation developed with Krohn, Ivan Chermayeff, Apple Computer’s Jonathon Ive, noted fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, architect Adele Santos and other artists and design experts.

The sophistication and scope in this interactive exhibition of electronics, fashion, furniture, packaging, car, computer software, graphic design and more is unprecedented for a child audience, but the importance of doing it is a no-brainer to Sain.

“You take something that’s so pervasive in our culture, where everything on the planet that’s not God-given, somebody designed. Even through your purchasing power you determine the built environment,” Sain said. So why not “deal with design with kids on this level, [give them] a sense of design literacy”?

Challenging the artists is as much a part of the process as challenging children.

“We’ve been through exhibitions here,” Sain said, “where we’ve had a dozen artists running around saying, ‘I’ve never done anything like this in my life,’ and we think, well, that’s the point.”

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San Diego artist and UC San Diego professor Ernest Silva is one of Sain’s many recruits and admirers. Silva created the installation “Cora’s Rain House,” a snug, serene art-making refuge in which recycled “rain” falls on a corrugated tin roof.

Silva, who has served on the museum’s board, calls what Sain does “social sculpture,” a term he illustrates by describing the 1996 exhibition “Ask Me If I Care,” dealing with racism, violence, pregnancy and other teen concerns. It was sparked by the local medical community’s desire to find meaningful ways to talk to teenagers about health issues.

The museum commissioned a young artist, Danielle Michaelis, to collaborate with teenagers in creating an exhibition you wouldn’t expect to find in a children’s museum. It featured rooms, including “bathrooms,” that explored body image and eating disorders. Parents were required to accompany children under 13 through it.

“It was unusual. It turned out to be not only a very provocative project but a place to discuss important things and deal with them constructively,” Silva said.

“What is so refreshing,” Silva said, “is that Bob thought about the museum as a creative space and that he has a great faith in artists being people who reflect on their environment, represent it and question it.

“You realize that this is someone who is really passionate about creativity and in what’s taking place in the world: How are people making decisions, how is the world changing, where do you jump in and say, ‘Let’s try this’?”

Silva is looking forward to working with Sain at LACMA too.

“When I think about a museum, I think about it as a collection of objects that are an ongoing conversation, about what the world is about. What does it look like? How do we represent it? How do we think about it? What’s the nature of emotion, mythology--oh, all manner of life issues? I think Bob is going to bring that to a really active place.”

“I can’t think of anybody in the country better able to take on this challenge than [Sain],” LACMA’s Rich said.

She “was blown away” when she visited the San Diego museum.

“To see the kind of energy and freedom and creativity that went into not just the facility but the program. To see the diverse populations and the age groups that were being served--there just isn’t enough like that in our society that gives our children room to breathe and grow. I was quite amazed.”

The burden is on LACMA, she said, “to make the collections we have understandable to the diverse set of audiences that we’re looking toward in the 21st century.”

From his perspective, “Los Angeles is extremely appealing,” Sain said, “because you’re dealing with not only a major American city but one of the art capitals of the planet. The opportunities are there to investigate questions that will have implications for what American museums are going to be in the future: How are they going to function? Who are they going to serve? What are these creatures in our culture with such extraordinary resources and brain power, that are increasingly becoming a real central focus for the community?”

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Los Angeles’ diversity is another compelling draw.

It is the arts, Sain said, that can provide the “language-free commonality” of communication, creativity and problem-solving in a city where more than 100 languages are spoken.

There’s not any one thing that Sain can point to that explains his passion for art. He speaks of his librarian mother--”I simply grew up around learning”--and he tells about taking his young son (now an adult) to Washington “and being a dutiful father, dragging him through every conceivable museum there and then asking him as we were flying out of the airport, ‘What did you like the most?’

“And he said, ‘The airport.’ So you begin to say there’s something wrong with this picture.”

Later, Sain watched his son at age 10 “absolutely loving what some might think would be extremely difficult, sophisticated, contemporary art.” That lesson stuck too.

“Kids have this sheer exuberance. Nothing’s predetermined, and there’s not one iota of intimidation.”

Someone who will sorely miss Sain in San Diego is his replacement, board member and artist Kay Wagner, who will leave her position as director of visual and performing arts for the San Diego Unified School District to take up the reins.

What Sain brought to the museum was “vision,” she said. “Vision and sophistication about what art does for kids and what artists can do for the community. He has been so consistent in getting the best artists we can get and in not compromising with ‘playland,’ with things that are played down for children.”

She shares Sain’s belief that “the more sophisticated the art, the more levels of understanding and interactions there are with it, from adults to children,” something Sain iterates emphatically.

What LACMALab will not be about is a bunch of levers and buttons for kids to pull and push “and then go running out saying, ‘Where’s the pizza?’ ” Sain said. “The integrity of the artist, the integrity of the collection, is not going to be compromised. There is absolutely a way to insist on the highest standards of quality that everybody can get a kick out of.”

Sain laments that for a museum to give children and family programming major emphasis is rare. It’s either “the big-time, high-quality, important stuff--or it’s for kids, you know? That is slap-backwards to me. When you ask me, ‘Why would you go to L.A.?’ it’s the idea that here’s a major institution, saying, insisting, that they’re going to have the same quality, if not higher, for kids, for families.”

“I go back to a museum being about the power of ideas. The literal word, muse and inspiration. Rather than saying you come to the museum to ‘get’ creativity, this is the reverse, saying that every child has creativity in them, every person does. Bring it to the museum and do something with it.”