ARTS FOR AMATEURS : The Getty Puts the Fun and Excitement Back Into a Museum Visit Through Its Family Circle Programs

For kids, art museums can be deadly.

Walking around quiet, forbidding rooms to look at old pictures ranks right up there on the boredom scale with visiting distant aunts. A few solemn visits with a disinterested parent, and a kid is a confirmed museum-hater for years.

But on a recent weekday, a group of freshly scrubbed elementary students from a private school in Sunland looked as if they were bursting with excitement as they gathered at the entrance of the J. Paul Getty Museum. It was not the wildly extravagant copy of an ancient Roman villa that excited them--they could hardly see any of it from where they were standing. And coming to the Getty was not a new experience for them--they had been here a couple times before.

The reason for their excitement soon descended down a marble staircase.

“Hey, everybody!” yelled Cathy McCarty-Procopio, museum educator. The kids all had huge smiles as she ran up to them, touching several on the head. McCarty-Procopio, 26, is the irrepressible, impish pied piper of the Getty. When she gives a tour, other staffers follow her around just for fun. And on this day, as she guided the Sunland kids around the villa with boundless energy, more than one adult visitor wandered over to ask, “Can I join this tour?”

Joining her tour meant getting down on the floor at times, as she huddled down to get on the same level as the kids, while firing questions in rapid-fire sequence and bubbling over with enthusiasm when the students figured out for themselves why an artist did something in a certain way or why a certain painting or sculpture is important.

“Did I tell you the answer?” she quizzed the students. “No, you got it all by yourselves. By looking. “

The Getty, like many museums around the country, has come to the conclusion that the way to interest kids is to make museum visits interactive.

“If I can get the kids to really look, to really use their eyes, to make it almost like a game, then going to a museum is fun ,” said McCarty-Procopio as she sat in a garden outside the villa before the students arrived.

She gives the student tours, organized by schools, several times a week. But any child, when accompanied by an adult, can take part in the McCarty-Procopio’s weekend program, Family Circle, that is at the heart of the Getty’s activities for children.

The Family Circle programs, which are usually held twice a month, switch topics monthly to spotlight different parts of the vast Getty collection. The programs are free, 1 1/2 to two hours long and are designed for children ranging in age from about 8 through 12. Reservations are a must, as the program sessions are limited to 15. Each child must be accompanied by an adult.

“Studies show that the people who come to museums as adults have a strong association of going to museums as a child with an adult who cared about art,” she said. “It does not have to be a parent--these days with the family unit changing it could be the next-door neighbor who takes the kids to cultural activities. But it is important that an adult be there.”

The programs include activities such as looking-games, treasure hunts, puzzles and even performances, all of which are designed to get historical or artistic points across.

This month the topic, “Putting It All Together,” is about how artistic scholars take a fragment of an ancient object and figure out where it came from, what it was used for and its artistic significance. Part one of the program, which will be given Saturday, is “Broken but Beautiful” and is about how pottery specialists can determine the original appearance of ancient Greek pots from their pieces.

After a talk about the importance of fragments--”We tell about why we keep these things instead of tossing them away like a glass that gets broken at home”--each of the student-adult teams will be assigned a different fragment in the collection to seek out. By examining it carefully, they will see what conclusions they can come to about the pot.

“Everything is geared toward making them look for themselves,” she said.

On Nov. 18, in “Puzzling Pots,” the program will move on to examining the shapes of pots and the designs painted on them. It will start with a lesson on how to recognize certain Greek gods and goddesses that show up on the pots. “All the men on the vase can tend to look the same,” McCarty-Procopio said. “We teach them that if you want to find Hercules, for example, you have to look for the one wearing the lion’s skin.”

The children and adults will be assigned different gods and goddesses to look for in a gallery full of ancient pots. When they get back together they will discuss other things they noticed about color, shape and possible usage.

At the end of that program, each of the participants will be given the traditional outline of a pot to decorate as they see fit.

“We did this last year and we got some great designs,” McCarty-Procopio said. “You’d be amazed at all the information kids and adults can pick up, even in an hour and a half. Just by looking.”

For a schedule of upcoming Family Circle programs and information about obtaining reservations, call the J. Paul Getty Museum information line at (213) 456-2003. The programs are generally given twice a month and are free.