Kidseum grows up in style

They’ll be rolling out a giant birthday cake Sunday at the Kidseum in Santa Ana as the children’s center celebrates a decade of play, art, history and music.

The Happy Birthday Kidseum Party includes ethnic music, dance and hands-on crafts. The mission of the center, created as an educational department of the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, has been to enlighten children about the world’s history and humanity through art and music.

The Kidseum will move next year to a new location inside the Bowers. “We will be losing something from this site, but gaining other elements at the new site,” director Genevieve Barrios Southgate says. Once inside Bowers, the Kidseum will occupy its own space and also have access to the galleries, exhibitions and surrounding courtyards of the main museum.

Taking over an abandoned building two blocks from the Bowers in 1994, the museum team created a variety of art and cultural programs for students, children and families, as well as a space for creativity and imagination.

The plain walls became colorful murals with cultural themes. Private citizens donated many collections such as masks, musical instruments, ethnic dress-up clothes and a granite rubbing table that contains ancient symbols, images and foreign alphabets.

In Kidseum style, the birthday celebration features a musical sampling of diverse cultures. The Relampago del Cielo dance troupe will perform traditional Mexican folklorico dances, Sandii Castleberry and her banjo-playing husband Ron Daigh will give a musical tour of early Americana, and members of the Belly Dance Theater will balance swords and perform ethnic dances to Mediterranean tunes.

Children can make Queen of Sheba art projects (in conjunction with the current Bowers “Queen of Sheba: Legend and Reality” exhibition) as well as Native American sand paintings, butterfly fans, Mexican God’s eyes and clay pots.

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Kidseum 10th Anniversary Celebration, 1802 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Noon-4 p.m. Sunday. Free. (714)

480-1520.