Field Trip to the DeCordova

On Sunday April 5th we took advantage of Bank of America Free Museums Weekend to visit the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The DeCordova is a museum of contemporary art in a lovely rural setting. It was a beautiful day with sunshine comfortable temperatures, important for a trip to the DeCordova as many of our favorite pieces in their collection are displayed outside in the sculpture garden. Our favorite sculpture garden works were Pine Sharks, a trio of circling sharks suspended in the treetops, and the Musical Fence, which was the only sculpture that was interactive. To fully experience it you needed to hit it with a stick.

Inside the museum proper some of the exhibits were hard to explain to Maura and not to everyone’s taste in our group. We all enjoyed the exhibit of contemporary portraiture even though some of the questions Maura had about the works in it were hard to answer. Many were intended to make the viewer ask questions that are hard to answer. Some of the paintings we saw in other galleries were a bit more difficult. They often dealt with adult themes that I was not comfortable discussing with a six year old. We only saw one of the short films. I would have liked to have watched more of them but Jennifer felt that my father, whose taste in art are more conservative than mine, would not enjoy them. We went back outside to the sculpture garden where everyone found works that interested them.

On our way out of the museum building we used the front door (we’d entered through a side door) and found something that I wish we had known about when we’d gone in. The DeCordova offers an interpretive activity kit for children that I think Maura would have enjoyed using. They update it when their exhibits change so it always features pieces that visitors might see. We’ll make sure we pick one up the next time we visit the DeCordova.

Before we left we visited the gift shop. Maura found a toy there that she had been looking for a long time, Popzolos. She had used them in her kindergarten class to create a character named Hut Dog that she has written many stories about. We’d identified what they were several months ago when we found them used in an exhibit at the Boston Children’s Museum but we hadn’t yet found them in a shop. She got a set as a souvenir and that topped off a very enjoyable visit.