Lively Museum
- An Educational Perspective

October 5, 2015

The Buffet Children's Museum
An art museum for child rearing in the community

Machi Ishima, Musee Bernard Buffet

Bernard Buffet was a painter known for his unique, monotone landscapes using straight, black lines. The Musee Bernard Buffet has collected about 2000 such pieces of art and has put them up for display.

This is a unique art museum featuring the works of just one painter, but 12% of our visitors are preschool children. If we assume that these children are always accompanied by parents/guardians, approximately 30% of visitors are children and their guardians. This is probably because we have The Buffet Children's Museum.

Nagaizumi-cho in Shizuoka Prefecture, where the museum is located, is known to have a higher birthrate than the national average. The Buffet Children’s Museum was opened in 1999, to provide parents and their children with a place to play and enjoy art in this town with a large number of young ones. The Children’s Museum is aimed primarily at preschool and primary school students and their parents. Feeling the wood beneath your feet, or with your whole body in the wooden ball pit, or touching the "Drawers of Sensation" made from a variety of different woods is befitting a museum in the middle of a forest. There are other activities, including a "Transformation Corner" where children can become the characters in Buffet's paintings, and a reading corner where parents and children can relax and be absorbed by the books. The children interact with the objects and museum pieces with their whole body. We strive to maintain an environment where the children can use their different senses, and their imaginations, in a safe manner.

I feel that the Children's Museum has significant meaning for child-rearing adults. Comments such as "I feel at ease when I bring the children to the museum, instead of being inside the house" suggest that the museum also fulfills some adult needs. Other parents have left the children with relatives at the Children’s Museum so that they could enjoy the rest of the museum on their own. In this way, it will be important to address the interests of adults creatively. To meet one such goal, we opened the Rudolf Steiner educational corner, as a part of the exhibit "Messages from Rudolf Steiner" who was known for his thoughts on education as well as the arts. We found that parents looked through this exhibit with great interest while the children were playing and some even flipped through reading materials that we provided. Although we are aware that separating children and parents is not a good idea, active engagement of parents, even in a Children's Museum, can allow parents to have a new perspective, which can have a positive impact on the growth of children.

Our museum has welcomed children since the opening of the Children's Museum in 1999. We hope to continue strengthening that relationship, by considering how the museum can stay involved in the child-rearing activities of the community.