Create and Play at San Diego's New Children's Museum

By Nicola Bridges

If you're looking for a very special, imaginative, enchanting and entertaining place to enthrall your kids when traveling in San Diego, California, there aren't many children's museums or contemporary art spaces quite like The New Children's Museum. Located close to San Diego Bay's harbor, NCM is a collaboration with the best contemporary artists of our time to create an immersive art space that kids can touch, feel and experience.

It delivers magnificently.

The artistic imagination invested is immediately apparent from the moment you approach the impressively beautiful, airy and light-filled three-level mostly glass contemporary building -- one of the first green museums in the country -- by sustainable design architect Rob Wellington Quigley. He describes the building's emotion as "very serious joy ... a lighthearted place of joy and laughter that at the same time takes education and art very seriously."

He absolutely nailed it, and the joy and laughter begin as you cross a welcoming bridge to the entrance with murals painted on each side -- a visual taste of the wonders to come.

With Gabrielle Wyrick, NCM's chief curator and director of audience engagement, as my guide, we head in to explore the clustered exhibitions and installations. First stop: Octavia E. Butler: Seeding Futures, a youth-centered exhibition about the life and legacy of the noted science fiction author, plus Wobble Land, tailored to toddlers, and the Breathing Room.

"There are lots of opportunities for big full-bodied play, but we're consciously providing interstitial places of calm and reflection as well," Wyrick said.

I fell in love with the Breathing Room, a really cool space of sculptures that move up and down at the rate of our breath, with beautiful textured floors and walls and places to sit and read with noise-canceling headphones.

"It's great for kids to take a reprieve from their hands-on art play," Wyrick said, "but we also try to consciously design to accommodate neurodivergent kids who need to center themselves."

The Paint Studio, a large patio and making space, features a huge sculpture called The Loving Dragon. It was created from kids' designs when they were asked what they'd love to see as their dream painted object. Every day there's a different color kids can use to get messy painting the entire dragon. In the hand-building Clay Studio, kids can get creative and build and sculpt their imaginations into reality.

We head down to the lower level to see two of the largest-scale installations. El Mas Alla, created by well-known binational street artist Panca, aka Paola Villasenor, provides total immersion into the artist's signature characters. While absorbed in the feature mural she based on Maslow's Pyramid of Needs, with a character for each pyramid section, kids climb into cool-looking structures with video animation inside.

Next we enter Teatro Pinata, a vibrant theater stage and portal to a surreal world influenced by old-school Mexican traveling theater caravans, designed by Tony-nominated costume and set designer David Reynoso. Here children can put on impromptu productions with props and costumes, experiencing theatrical trickery and stage effects.

We head next to the upper level's beloved installation called The Wonder Sound by designer, artist and educator Wes Bruce. Its centerpiece is a three-story magical labyrinth tree house of nooks and ropes for unending exploration. Wyrick describes the whimsical Wonder Sound perfectly:

"It draws influence from tree houses, canyons at night, animals that have never been seen, sacred plants, silhouetted mountain ranges, original stories and forgotten histories, whispered languages, ancient footpaths and imaginary places, blending fact and fiction and the tangible with the ephemeral."

It's truly a discovery work of art you physically enter into and explore, chockful of ways to make sound by interacting with a plethora of artistic objects and areas. My favorite is a small, magical darkened and domed cavelike room where 3,000 spoons hang illuminated from the ceiling for making music when touched or jangled. Cavern Lights is a connected companion-piece installation -- a reflective, quiet space with a meditation room in the center, filled with affirmations where lights glimmer and gleam to the cadence of breath.

Finally, we head to the installation the kid in me has been dying to see: Whammock! a huge, gravity-defying, large-scale interactive and colorful crocheted sculpture of open pockets, hanging pendulums, pathways and crevices with humongous hammocks suspended from the ceiling. Kids climb up through the bottom to a large suspended net at the top.

"It's handsewn and hand-dyed by Japanese-born Canadian-based artist Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam, now in her 80s," Wyrick said. "Even though it's very much handmade, we worked with structural engineers so it's super safe and sustainable to hold all the weight."

Watching the kids' sheer wonderment throughout this amazing hands-on museum, I dream of locking the doors and spending a week here. There's so much more to explore and do -- and more to come. A top-grade ceramics studio with a kiln, mixed-media paints, screen printing, textiles and fabrics for kids to create without constraints is set to debut in late 2024.

"'Think, play, create' is NCM's mission mantra."

"We want to make the arts and going to museums an integral part of children's lives," Wyrick said. "Because as adults, no matter who you are or what you do, you can always centralize art in your life. We truly believe it here."

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WHEN YOU GO

The New Children's Museum is open daily 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. except Tuesdays. Adults $24, kids $20, under 1 year old free: www.thinkplaycreate.org.

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Nicola Bridges is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.