By now you’ve heard about the new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art
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dedicated to multihyphenate David Bowie. Given Bowie’s huge fan base and the fact that this British-born exhibit is making its only U.S. stop in Chicago, it’s one of the buzziest shows to come to Chicago in years. The exhibit title is also a sentence fragment, “David Bowie Is,” that inspires people to complete it. Here’s an unexpected way to fill in that blank: David Bowie is for families.Adults might not think that a retrospective about the gender-bending artist’s career might interest kids. For younger ones, that might be true. But we’ve seen the exhibit, and really: What wouldn’t interest older kids? Bowie sings and dances; he plays dress-up; he invents characters. The artist never lost his inner-child ability to make wild leaps in imagination.
That’s one reason Bowie will be the focus of the MCA’s upcoming Family Days, in which local artists lead free programming for groups with kids 12 and under. They happen on the second Saturday of the month and include free general admission. (If you want to see the Bowie exhibit, however, you’ll still need to buy a special ticket for that.)
“While kids may not know who David Bowie is, many ideas he was exploring 30 years ago are still so very salient to 9- and 10-year-old kids,” said Marissa Reyes, MCA’s associate director of education. “They’re very aware of media and of shifting identities. That’s what got us excited when we started thinking about designing our artist-led projects for Family Day.”
On Oct. 11 and Nov. 8, local artists will lead activities inspired by themes in Bowie’s work.
“We went both literal and metaphorical with two ideas: dare and changes,” Reyes said. “David Bowie was a rebel and an out-of-the-box thinker, especially when he was just starting out. For October, we thought, how do we want families to have that same experience (of daring)?”
On Oct. 11, families can elect to play a “very immersive truth-or-dare game, on a very grand scale,” she said. They can also find one room being taken over by a comic-book artist — “she’ll create this immersive environment where kids and families get to play hero and go on a quest.”
On Nov. 8, two MCA artists will guide children and parents through some amusing ch-ch-changes when they encounter the Presto-Change-o machine, which they will use to experiment with new identities. The staff is still playing with the details, Reyes says, but the idea is that kids and parents will get materials, such as fake facial hair, to change their appearance. Don’t miss the photo-op after both generations visit the face painter and emerge wearing Bowie’s signature lightning-bolt makeup.
“It’s very playful. We recognize that we’ll have 5- and 6-year-olds or even younger, all the way up to teenagers and grownups,” she says. “We’re aiming for playful yet sophisticated projects that can appeal to the very young and the old.”
“David Bowie Is” runs through Jan. 4, 2015, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. (312-280-2660, mcachicago.org). General admission and activities on Family Days (11 a.m.-3 p.m. Oct.11 and Nov. 8) are free for families; tickets to the Bowie exhibit cost $25, $10 for kids 7-12. Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” screens at noon Oct. 19. No special ticket required, just regular museum admission: $7, free for kids 12 and under.
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