Museum with a kid’s touch

In a dim little space filled with soft-sculpture “weeds” and video projections, third-graders bop each other with big pillows. Adults and children, sitting outside a “greenhouse” made of 8,000 recycled plastic water bottles, turn bits of recycled trash into one-of-a-kind flowers. A dad, reaching high, and his preschooler, reaching low, share quality time blissfully snap-popping huge sheets of hanging bubble wrap.

An art museum where “don’t touch” doesn’t apply? At Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s LACMA West, noise and dashing about are not only acceptable but expected in the Boone Children’s Gallery, home to “Making,” an experimental new art exhibition that celebrates and explores the process of creating art.

“Making,” which runs until Sept. 1, is presented by LACMALab, the museum’s research and development unit, in a first-time collaboration with students from four area art colleges: Art Center, Otis, UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture and CalArts.

Teams of students worked with the museum and architecture firm Frederick Fisher and Partners to develop and install their original works, transforming the gallery into a funky warehouse space -- concrete posts, exposed pipes -- filled with art that is meant to be used, altered and eventually completed through visitors’ own creative efforts.

The students’ mandate: “to create participatory installations that would reveal the process of making art,” said LACMALab Director Robert Sain, “and equally engage a child and an adult in what we have come to describe as an ‘age-free’ space.”

The plastic “greenhouse,” for instance, empty when the exhibition opened Nov. 24, has come to blazing life with hundreds of colorful fantasy flowers made by visitors -- from toddlers to grandparents -- out of scraps of paper, plastic and cloth.

A 10-foot-tall clear container, the top accessible by a long ramp, is slowly filling with a collage of made and found contributions -- drawings, shredded paper, dried clay, even a sock or two. In a glassed-in “fan room,” kids toss swirls of foam chips and paper. “The fan room is fun,” said recent visitor Mackenzie Marcotte, 8, of Pasadena. “It’s like it’s snowing flowers and puffballs.”

Elsewhere, table-sized sheets of drawing paper offer an oasis of calm, while wooden “sensory pods,” created for the exploration of smells, sounds and images related to the seasons, are quiet too; offering a less intuitive experience, they have fewer visitors.

“The great thing about it is that you just come in and do what you want to do,” said Aratha Johnson of Woodland Hills, as her 5-year-old daughter, Delilah, happily trundled up and down an 11-foot mountain of clay sloped against two walls.

“Mommy, this is much better than playing on the slide,” she giggled.

What has happened to that irresistible heap of clay, however, may figure prominently in the academic analysis of “Making’s” evolution that is being compiled by USC’s Museum Studies Program.

Along with a nearby “web” of postcard art, said Art Center student Piper Olf, the clay was meant to explore “the exchange between the community, the museum and the artist by having a depletion and an accumulation take place.” The postcards were to accumulate; the clay was to “slowly disappear as people came and took it home and used it to keep the creative process going.”

Instead, “somebody at the opening started taking pieces and using the walls around the mound as a canvas,” Sain said. “No one expected that.”

Once pristine white, the walls are now covered with clay letters, words, animals, people and, in thin smears of the stuff, scratch drawings.

The visitor interaction has been “kind of breathtaking,” said Otis student Tami Demaree. “I had no idea how aggressive kids would be -- when they enter a space filled with things that are there for them, there’s no hesitation, no shyness.”

*

‘Making’ art

Where: Boone Children’s Gallery, LACMA West, 6067 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Noon-5 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Wednesdays. Runs through Sept. 1.

Cost: Free

Info: (323) 857-6000; www.lacma.org