was fantastic. I highly recommend adding it to your itinerary when you visit Salem.My traveling companions (we'll call them my "focus group") were 8 and 5, and I could have left them at the Trashimal table for hours. This exhibit definitely passed the kid test.
Trash Menagerie is a celebration of the recycled. The animals on exhibit were made from umbrella pieces, old bike parts, corrugated cardboard (like them monkey on the right), bunt pans (My favorite! The green glowing centipede on the right.), campaign buttons, pots and pans, plastic bottles, old sweaters and more.
The artists' creativity inspired my kids to want to go home and make something out of nothing, and the recycling bin is now considered art supplies.
The kids really enjoyed the Trashimal board where they
could use magnetized features to create their own animal - real or fictitious. We had a 5-headed-animal and a 2-headed-bird before too long.Now, we went to the museum specifically for the Trash Menagerie exhibit, but the banner promoting the Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes exhibit absolutely drew in my 5 year old. so the focus group headed upstairs to this wonderful new exhibit of seascapes painted by the Dutch masters.
This gave me the opportunity to talk to the kids
about art and looking at art - we talked about angry water, and rainbows, the very big ships sinking, and how amazing it was that a painter can make all of the details of a ship's rigging look so real. The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes is certainly not an exhibit geared for young children, but it was fascinating, nonetheless. There is a conservator's station in the exhibit, which fascinated the kids just as it had fascinated me when I first saw the exhibit.
The Boston Globe and The Salem News and Northshore Art Throb have each covered the Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes. I recommend checking them out, and then visiting the PEM for the Trash Menagerie, the Seascapes, and everything else. It's a brilliant place to spend the afternoon.
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