Keith Haring Museum Nakamura

For Golden Week, we booked a cottage up in Nakamura, Yamanashi for a few days. The day we arrived we decided to go for lunch and drove past the Keith Haring museum, of course it meant we had to go back and check it out!

One of the things I love about Japan is the high quality of art galleries and museums. Back when the economy was booming a lot of rich businessmen invested in art and would tend to specialise in one artist, so there are several very high quality museums around the place. We have been to a Dali one in Fukushima and The Picasso one in Hakone, I'm sure there are plenty more to discover.

The Keith Haring museum was no exception. It was, as expected, a lot of fun and they were fine about taking photos as long no flash was used and there was one piece that they asked not to take photos of. We have studied about Keith Haring in the past, so it wasn't a totally new artist for Ebi-kun and he remembered many of the pieces. We have a fun Haring inspired activity HERE

This of course meant there was a lot of silliness going on, which was only made worse by the fact there were no other people in the place!

I love this one of Ebi-kun, the almost invisible boy...

And this one cracks me up! Nutters!

The shop was full of amazing things, most of which would have happily made their way home with me, sadly I could only choose one and this Jump From Paper bag HAD to be it. 

Yes, I do have to keep staring at it because it's so quirky! Keep your LV and Coach bags, I'd rather have something wacky like this!

And if you want to take your kids to art museums and have them learning and enjoying the experience, you need to grab this book!

Keith Haring Art Day...

We had fun learning about Keith Haring. We don't actually have a book about his work so we turned to the net and had a look through the Keith haring website instead. Then it was time to do some Keith Haring inspired art.

We started by making a couple of jointed paper dolls from a cereal box...

Ebi-kun's first attempt, the pieces were too small so we had to redo them, of course, I only have fancy brads/fasteners!

He then drew around the paper doll onto coloured card, then moved the position of the arms and leg and did another one of different coloured card. Before cutting them out, he traced round them with a thick black marker pen.

Then cut out the pieces and stuck them to a nice bright piece of paper. Lots of bright coloured paper/card is needed for this project!

Final touches were to add the little black movement lines.....

And done... not sure what this new 'sticking tongue out' pose is all about! Hopefully he will grow out of that soon.