Art & Museums

Come celebrate the New Year, namely Oshogatsu, the Japanese new year, this Sunday, January 4th at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). In honor of the new year the museum is offering free admission all day and a free Oshogatsu Family Festival from 11am to 4pm. The festival is going to be one nice size family bash including a crafts area where kids can make their own

You have this last weekend of winter/family vacation to escape the holiday rut you've been stuck in for two weeks and get out and do something fun and meaningful with the kids. The Getty Center in Los Angeles just might have that certain activity to help you break free for a few hours of quality family time before you're thrust right back into that humdrum day-to-day routine for good. This Saturday and Sunday the museum is holding their Family Art Stops program.

Bowers Museum in Santa Ana is holding a really great Kwanzaa Family Festival this Saturday, December 27th for families looking to learn more about the holiday or just looking for s a nice way to celebrate the holiday together. According to the site "Join us in a cultural tradition that celebrates the best of African thought, practice, and culture, the well-being of family and community, the integrity of the environment and our kinship with it.

If you're like me you've been desperately wanting to stroll the grounds of the Getty Villa in Malibu exploring the Greek antiquities and such yet have hesitated since it's reopening over two years ago because you just can't shake the image of the havoc your tiny tikes are sure to wreck if cut lose on the villa's beautiful grounds.

This Saturday, September 27, Smithsonian Magazine is sponsoring Museum Day 2008. "Enjoy free general admission for you and a guest to hundreds of museums and cultural venues nationwide. Present the Museum Day admission card to receive free general admission at participating Museum Day locations.

Nathan Sawaya is a professional LEGO artist and former LEGO Master Model Builder, who has been playing with LEGOS since he was five. "His work is obsessively and painstakingly crafted and is both beautiful and playful," says the museum. "Sawaya’s ability to transform LEGO bricks into something new, his devotion to scale and color perfection, the way he conceptualizes the action of the subject matter, enables him to elevate an ordinary toy to the status of art..."

Yeondoo Jung's "Wonderland" collection of images where children's drawings were transformed into photographs is simply magical. I know by watching my 8 year old son sketch out entire worlds he's imagined up that in his mind they are very realistic places where anything and everything can happen.