Press

Spare Times for Children for Aug. 17-23

If you want to get blank stares from children under 10, just ask them if they want to be milliners when they grow up. Or textile designers.

They won’t be puzzled by the strange words alone. The world, and especially New York, offers careers seldom seen in children’s books and television shows. And you rarely encounter them in young people’s museums.
But now you can, at least locally. “NYC Design Studio,” at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, invites small visitors to conduct their own experiments while showcasing the work and creative processes of four professionals: Christiane Lemieux, a textile designer and the founder of DwellStudio; Belinda Watts, an architect with the firm Gensler; Rachel Hauck, a set designer; and Lola Ehrlich, founder of Lola Hats.

“This is our first experience with a different kind of installation,” said Andrew S. Ackerman, the museum’s executive director, one without “your typical children’s museum interactive stations.”

The only high-tech equipment is a device in which aspiring designers can place an object and view it under artificial light or a source mimicking natural light — conditions that affect the color. Sketches, swatches, photographs, cases of tools and hats, architectural models, miniature set designs and the designers’ quotations line the gallery’s perimeter.

The interior has long tables for daily workshops, which each week focus on a theme. This week it’s “Playful Patterns and Prints”; next week it’s “My Own Broadway Set.” On Sunday at 2 p.m. Ms. Hauck will help inaugurate that series.“I’m very excited to speak about what it means to create a world around a story, which is what I do,” she said. The installation includes Ms. Hauck’s models for “Slowgirl,” above, Greg Pierce’s play set in the Costa Rican jungle, which recently closed at Lincoln Center. “That design is absolutely perfect for kids because it’s so completely graphic,” she said. “Trees are represented by multicolored planks.”

Children will make their sets from card stock, recreating an image from a favorite show and fashioning components from clay, pipe cleaners, beads, craft sticks and other materials. They may be surprised to learn that their methods don’t differ much from those of Ms. Hauck, who prefers to draft by hand. As she put it, “There’s nothing like a pencil.”

(Through Sept. 30 at the Tisch Building, 212 West 83rd Street; 212-721-1223, cmom.org. Summer hours: daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; to 7 p.m. on Saturdays. Free with museum admission: $11; $7 for 65+; free for under 1 and members.)

By LAUREL GRAEBER