Museum Mile

June 3rd

Tonight was my least favorite work event of the year, Museum Mile. While the concept of closing down 5th Ave for a street fair and opening up all the museums for free is great for the public and free publicity for us, it's really hell on our little museum and the art.

In the span of three hours we had 2,450 visitors come through the galleries. Our poor 100 year old town house HVAC just can't keep up with that volume of body heat and traffic. In addition, the museum becomes packed with people who don't know how to properly behave in a cultural institution and unruly sticky kids hopped up on sugar from the street vendors.

In the past I've been stationed around the most vulnerable or fragile works of art. This year, we had wonderful volunteers for guard duty and I decided my time was best spent roaming with a walkie talkie checking in and the radioing security about crowd control. This also sort of freed me to experience (and photograph) the fun side of the festival and all the cool little things we do for kids. For example, we hire a jazz duet who get kids to scat with them on stage. Too cute.

Some of the models from the school get dressed up and pose so kids can draw from life. There was a line ten deep waiting their turn. Check out this little artist in the making. She's doing better than I would!

Unfortunately, we also give out colored chalk for making street art. While the results make for great photos, I noticed lots of kids (who will touch things if not properly supervised) running around the museum with chalky filthy hands.