Family Spaces at the High Museum of Art

Dive into the history of family spaces in art museums, using the High Museum of Art as a case study.

By Julia Forbes

Families are a critical audience for museums. The first museum spaces dedicated just for children began to crop up at the turn of the twentieth century. Art museums were at the forefront in creating spaces for children, and the interactive innovations made at the High Museum of Art in the 1960s helped push the field forward. The High has had a dedicated interactive space for families to learn, play, and explore since 1968. Over that time, we have created ten family gallery installations. Let’s look back at how we got here.

In October of 1968, the High moved into the Memorial Arts Building and introduced its first dedicated space for families called Color/Light/Color (1968–1971). The space explored the nature, properties, and uses of color. In the press packet from 1968, Gudmund Vigtel (museum director, 1963–1991) said, “My proudest accomplishment to date is the Junior Activities Center established within the museum . . . children are the art audiences of the future. The more knowledgeable they are, the greater the dialog possible between the community and the museum.” During that time, there were five installations of the Junior Activities Center: following Color/Light/Color came Shapes (1971–1974), The City (1974–1978), Children in America (1978–1979), and finally Spaces and Illusions (1979–1983).

The work the High was doing in this arena caught the attention of the art museum education world. In a groundbreaking publication in 1978, The Art Museum as Educator: A Collection of Studies as Guides to Practice and Policy, the Junior Activities Center, the High’s docent program, and Shapes were featured as models of how to approach engaging children at the art museum.

As the High grew, so did the scale and excitement around the family space. For the opening of the new Richard Meier–designed building (now the Stent Family Wing), a team came together to create a show-stopping installation for families. Housed in the lower level of the new museum, with a huge eyeball looking out over Peachtree Street, Sensation (1983–1988) focused on the five senses and allowed visitors to interact with sculptures that related to seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, and tasting. The space included artworks from the High’s collection as well as interactive sculptures commissioned for the project. The exhibition explored how the arts engage and enlarge our senses, how technology and the media act as extensions of the senses, and how different experiences and points of view affect our perceptions.

Spectacles (1988–1993) was a series of room environments by eight internationally acclaimed artists. Each installation focused on a different theme. Atlanta artist Martin Emanuel dealt with the elements of light and color through a neon light sculpture, while Robert Morris’s mirrored maze addressed ideas of line and illusion. In each area, children could explore creativity and the elements of art, focusing on the components artists use to create works of art like ideas, materials, line, color, space, illusion, and light. Both Sensation and Spectacles still evoke gleeful excitement in the voices of adults who describe the fun they had there as children.

The family space moved to its current location by the early 1990s. The first space on the main level of the museum was called the Visual Arts Learning Space(or VALS; 1993–2003) and included original artwork from the museum’s collection along with labels containing insights, clues, experiments, visuals, and facts about the artworks. Visitors were encouraged to look closely, compare, and reconsider their preconceptions about art. In the center of the gallery, they could work like an artist alone or in groups while four computer stations offered additional ways to experience color, line, light, and composition.

With the 2005 expansion of the High, designed by architect Renzo Piano, the family space became the Greene Family Learning Gallery. The first installation (2005–2018) focused on five activity areas based around creative play and rooted in the High’s collection. This space was dedicated to a free-form style of creative play for toddlers to ten-year-olds. An open-space plan, the gallery comprised five hands-on activity areas — “Building Buildings,” “Transforming Treasure,” “Making a Mark,” “Sculpting Spaces,” and “Telling Stories” — inspired by some of the most popular objects in the museum’s collection.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the High’s commitment to families, the Greene Family Learning Gallery was completely redesigned with all-new interactive environments. We took this opportunity to reenvision our relationship with Atlanta’s families. Our goal was to make the High an essential place for our community, where children and adults could engage together in informal learning, intergenerational communication, and play. We sought out experts from around Atlanta who work in different areas of education, including early learning, design thinking, accessibility, and serving people with disabilities, to brainstorm with us to create the 2018 Greene Family Learning Gallery.

The new space expanded to include a second room directly across the hall, doubling its previous footprint. The original Greene Family Learning Gallery space is “CREATE,” a bright and open studio devoted to developing young visitors’ art-making abilities and centered on the creative process. The expansion space across the hall is “EXPERIENCE,” a deeply immersive gallery that enables visitors to explore what art means, how it feels, and where it can take us. Each gallery space features a quiet space with activities designed for reflection and a chance to get away from the noisier, more active main rooms, as well as an area specifically for babies and toddlers.

To learn more about my experiences and research around creating meaningful spaces for families, check out the book I cowrote with Marianna Adams, Family Spaces in Art Museums: Creating Curiosity, Wonder, and Play.

This blog post was adapted from two High Museum of Art posts about family spaces in art museums: Celebrating Fifty-Five Years of Museum Family Spaces and Community Collaboration and the Greene Family Learning Gallery: A Look Back at Our Beginnings.