AGO welcomes kids

Art Gallery of Ontario — The major renovation of the city’s biggest gallery has garnered plenty of reviews, many of them mixed. But the real question remains: should you take your kids? Luckily, the gallery — like many other local institutions like Harbourfront — now more openly welcomes young ones, and has created more things for them to do. Central to the gallery’s new vision is its renovated Off The Wall space in the basement, which is open just on weekends from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It’s the same 1,800-square-foot space, but the look and philosophy are more modern. Instead of giving kids very specific things to do, the different sections of the room offer a range of materials and a basic theme, but the play that results is a lot more open. The best example of this is the DIY Junktion, which is a zone filled with colourful things (most of them plastic Ikea products). Kids can form “sculptures” of this stuff if they like, stacking them on upright poles (all the junk has holes in it to slip down the poles), or just mess around. Similarly, the Observatory has low walls lined with tactile squares, perfect for crawlers to touch, and there’s also Lego and a bin of telescopes and the like to look at the stuff stuck to the ceiling. One wall of the room, Make Your Mark, lets kids draw on a chalkboard or in picture frames. There are tables scattered through the room loaded with arty activities. The plan is to change many of these on a regular basis, to match up with gallery exhibits or what the kids are into that day. When we visited, everyone was into colouring with markers on the huge pieces of paper staff tossed on the floor. Upstairs in the gallery proper, many of the exhibits now have so-called educational hubs. They feature drawing activities, but also blue discovery briefcases, which are filled with family-oriented activities that relate to the exhibit at hand. You can nab one, open it up, do the activities and then put it back when you’re done and move on to another room. The gallery still runs numerous art classes and as a new promotion, high school kids can now get in free from 3 to 5:30 Tuesdays through Fridays. 317 Dundas Street West, 877-225-4246, www.ago.net.