Kids, Can You Say ‘Cultural Diversity’?

CROWN HEIGHTS, Brooklyn — Now that nearly every museum is also a children’s museum — now that nearly every museum has programs that strive to lure the young — what do we seek from a museum that really is a children’s museum? And not just any children’s museum, but the venerable Brooklyn Children’s Museum, reopening this weekend after spending nearly $70 million on reconstruction, rethinking and redesign?

I got an inkling of what might be sought when I entered the curved blazing-yellow frame of the expanded building, which, next to the stately buildings across the street, looks as sedate as a beach ball at a black-tie dinner party. I turned past the well-stocked shelves of the requisite gift shop, and entered Totally Tots, an entirely new realm where children under 5 are being inducted into museumland. And I laughed.

I laughed because in Water Wonders, the first gallery of this exhibition space — O.K., the first amusement area of this colorful indoor playground — water was spraying against whirligigs mounted on a blue wall, spinning them before coursing down into a plastic pond. Dams could be lifted, letting the water cascade in mini-waterfalls as bright plastic toys bobbed on the surface. I imagined a score of young visitors reaching, spraying, screeching with pleasure at the unceasing motion, the bold colors and rush of liquid sensations. On transparent walls through which the dry hallway could be seen, more aesthetically minded toddlers could paint or draw, before their masterpieces were washed away with the turn of a faucet.

I laughed because this was clever and daring; the water machinery would have lured even a jaded adult to join in child’s play, had he been in appropriate company. Nothing else in Totally Tots rose to this level, though the sandbox with its brilliant blue granules, and its wall dividers decorated with geodes and fossils from the museum’s collection, might come close. The reading nook and puppet theater were also thoroughly inviting.

So here was something potentially different. Admittedly, the cranky critic in me worried that there was no identification of the objects on display in Totally Tots: the dolls behind glass cases adjacent to others more readily played with, the extraordinary masks that could not be handled along with others that could. Who knows what conversations might arise with a child if a few well-chosen facts were provided? Knowledge too can be a form of play.

But exuberance could be felt here. So could surprise. And if this spirit were combined with a playful approach to knowledge, what else might be possible? Many museums, serving far less troubled neighborhoods than this one does (Crown Heights) are coming to think of themselves as community centers and alternative schools. How much more effective might they be if play and information were intertwined, with children’s museums leading the way?

Perhaps because of this potential, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s fund-raising was immensely successful, with more than $80 million coming from public and private sources. And the museum spared little expense in its redesign. In its 104,000-square-foot reconstructed building it has almost doubled its exhibition space, to 20,000 square feet from 12,500, and added another 10,000 square feet on the rooftop, where bleachers frame an outdoor theater. It expects to increase annual visitors to 400,000 from 250,000. Its architect, Rafael Viñoly, has created a new second floor that is light and clean and functional. The building is green, with waterless urinals, token solar panels and geothermal heating and cooling. Many of its exhibitions will undoubtedly amuse and teach. There is much to appreciate here.

But after a while the visitor is left stranded in appreciation. There is not much that is daring, and too much that is dutiful. Even the playground waterfall is a bit of a feint, an allusion to the old “learning environment” designed by Edwin Schlossberg when the museum was last reconceived in the 1970s. One piece of that past remains: a giant walk-through tube that cuts through the main exhibition space, within which neon lights circle around a trench of flowing water that children can manipulate with sluices and locks and obstacles.

The approach is different this time around. In a quest for neighborhood connections the museum has embraced Brooklyn in its two main exhibitions: its nature display is an array of Brooklyn habitats, and its cultural exhibition a streetscape of storefronts reflecting multicultural communities. But the institutional mission has shifted in other directions too.

It has distanced itself from what Mr. Schlossberg described as a playful “research laboratory” in which children could experiment and explore. It has distanced itself too from its heritage as an offshoot of the Brooklyn Museum. Founded in 1899, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum — it claims to be the first of its kind — is one of the only children’s museums with a collection of objects, almost 30,000.

Many come from 19th-century collections: antiquities, items from non-Western cultures, zoological models, minerals and shells. In its early years they made the museum a kind of exotic educational supplement: children would visit its old Victorian building as collectors in training. In the evolutionary symbolism of the period, these premodern or natural objects also were well suited to the explorations of children pursuing their own evolutionary course toward adulthood.

By the 1970s, though, the collection came to seem a burden; pieces were incorporated into displays but not highlighted. Now in a rotating exhibition, “Collections Central,” the objects are more plentiful but stripped of original meanings. They fill several display cases not to illustrate something about cultures or time periods, but to show how miscellaneously interesting such things can be: a piece of prehistoric amber, a 20th-century Nigerian mask, a 2,500-year-old Egyptian amulet. Cases are organized by type rather than origin, like masks or belts or buckles.

Still, of the museum’s shows, I liked the promise of this modest one the most. It does not presume that there is an interest in the child; it presumes that an interest might be developed. And so the museum has created a “curiosity cabinet,” invoking the places collectors once kept their eccentric collections (including, here, an eight-foot-high Asian elephant skeleton). I am wary of the desire to fragment the past and its cultures in this way — turning the museum back into a cabinet rather than turning the cabinet into a museum — and much depends on the guides who will allow children to handle some objects while learning how to create projects based upon them. More information is promised online (brooklynkids.org/emuseum). But this show has the potential to reveal a museum’s possibilities to a child.

The problems are in the two main exhibitions. In the 5,000 square feet of Neighborhood Nature, Brooklyn’s natural habitats are on display: in a “freshwater pond” stuffed creatures from the museum’s taxidermy collection can be found; a “saltwater beach” offers the sound of gulls and the opportunity to touch horseshoe crabs; a “community garden” provides simulated soil and planting tools. There are activities: piece together a bug, identify animal tracks, listen to duck sounds. In a Science Inquiry Center there are a handful of live animals (including a 200-pound, 20-foot-long albino Burmese python), and more exotic taxidermy. It is quite nice, but not terribly imaginative. The lessons about environmental concerns and the display of natural habitats have become formulaic in contemporary science museums; even the concept seems a little dated.

The multicultural cityscape of World Brooklyn also has a slightly antiquated flavor. Specific stores from various ethnic neighborhoods are reproduced, within which a culture’s ways of life are partly shown. In the World Journal bookstore of Sunset Park the rudiments of Chinese writing are displayed; in the Owa Afrikan Market of Clinton Hill, African textile patterns can be created using magnetic stamps; in L&B Spumoni Gardens in Bensonhurst, children can pretend to sell pizza. There are also Mexican and Caribbean stores, and younger children can play store at an International Grocery. Each display mixes objects from the museum’s collections with commercial products.

There are many peculiarities here: the reference to real stores is oddly promotional; the cultural knowledge provided is pretty thin; and the museum’s collection is diminished, not strengthened by such displays. It is also strange, given the museum’s neighborhood orientation, that no storefront offers a hint of nearby Lubavitch Jews (or features any other Brooklyn Jewish community). Finally it was difficult to see how this exhibition, despite its video clips and interactive displays, would create a powerful experience for children.

In fact, children seem somewhat secondary here. In 1902 the museum’s curator stressed the importance of the child, who must feel “always a welcome visitor, never an intruder.” In 1950 the museum’s director said the goal should be “to understand and satisfy the child’s mind, to be in tune with his thinking and capacity.” In the 1970s version the child was all: the purpose of the museum, Mr. Schlossberg said, was to allow children to begin to see themselves as “workings of art.” Now, in the Brooklyn exhibition, and to a certain extent, even in the nature show, the focus is less on the child than on the multicultural themes that donors, both public and private, cherish and the museum wants to promote.

Does the museum still provide something valuable? Yes. And a visiting exhibition about an astronaut’s daily life, part of a series being shared by a consortium of children’s museums, is worth seeing just to find out about the all-important issue of potty use in outer space. But thinking of the disappointed hopes raised by Water Wonders, I wistfully sought something else: the thrill of unexpected play.