Eldest Daughter and I took Brown Bear Daughter (age 9) and some of her friends to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston this afternoon. Eldest Daughter drove since I have a freeway-phobia.

We started out in the Caroline Weiss Law Building which “serves as the permanent home of the modern and contemporary collections” and “is also a multicultural showcase, housing dazzling installations of Oceanic art, Asian art, Indonesian gold artifacts, and Pre-Columbian and sub-Saharan African artworks.” I did not know this, and although I had one child asking me where the “real paintings” were, it turned out fairly well. There was an exhibit upstairs of South American or maybe just Brazilian artworks designed to “bring art to the masses.” My children, especially Karate Kid (age 7), and their friends, and I certainly qualify as members of the masses, and the children especially enjoyed all the interactive art pieces: glasses you put on to distort your vision in various ways, a room of colored beams of light where Brown Bear Daughter did a pirouette, and a large net enclosing about fifty balls with a scale in the middle. This last one you could walk into, but the only thing to do was weigh the balls, I guess. I felt a little awkward; it seemed to me that the whole exhibit would fit in well in a building at Epcot or even Astroworld, but I’m almost sure the artist intended me to “get” something more than a theme park adventure.

We exclaimed over the African gold, and the girls saw a beautiful sari. Then it was on to the Audrey Jones Beck Building where they keep the “real paintings.” Here I had to talk to Karate Kid somewhat sternly about making rude comments concerning nude Greek statues. However, we all enjoyed the impressionists and the many, many Biblical scenes. We played “guess which Bible story is depicted in this painting.” Karate Kid’s and my favorite Biblical scene was called The Judgement of Solomon. I liked Susan Comforting the Baby by Mary Cassatt because the baby reminded me of Z-Baby.
All in all, a pretty good trip to the art museum–except for the part when Karate Kid and some of the girls were reprimanded by one of the museum guards for running up and down the escalator. Oh, well, both our group and the museum survived.