Children's Museum of Atlanta


The Children's Museum of Atlanta is a children's museum located in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1988 as a "Museum Without Walls," the museum opened to the public in 2003. The museum is located Downtown, adjacent to Centennial Olympic Park. The 16,316-square-foot museum, one of four children's museums in Georgia, includes exhibits designed for and geared toward children under the age of nine and hosts field trips from schools and learning centers throughout North Georgia.
The Imaginators, the museum's troupe of professional actors, guide field trip groups through the museum, invent fun hands-on activities for children, and create terrific programming, including original and lively 20-minute mini-musicals, which are frequently themed to tie in with the featured traveling exhibit. The Imaginators connect play and learning in a fun way.

History

For its first fifteen years, the Children's Museum of Atlanta was a "Museum Without Walls." In 1999, then-executive director Pat Turner wrote, "There is no edifice for the children's museum. While planning for a facility, the staff developed programs to help young people think about their community and about the role they have in it ... The community is the museum." The facility, located in the ground floor of Museum Tower, opened to the public in March, 2003. It celebrated its tenth birthday over the weekend of March 2–3, 2013, with special events and a giant birthday card. The museum temporarily closed on August 1, 2015, to undergo an $8.2 million renovation. The museum added a 3,000-square-foot second-story mezzanine, a two-story climbing structure and many other permanent exhibits. The museum reopened on December 12, 2015.

Exhibits

The permanent exhibits include Fundamentally Food, which allows children to role play through the cultivation of food at a farm, its delivery to a grocery store, and consumption in a home kitchen, Tools for Solutions, the centerpiece of which is a machine that, using corkscrews and cranes, transports balls through a series of tracks, and Leaping into Learning, a small play area for guests younger than five, Let Your Creativity Flow, an area devoted to the arts, complete with an art studio, a paint wall and a stage for performances, Gateway to the World, which is devoted to teaching children about geography, topography, and culture.

The Morph Gallery

The museum typically hosts three traveling exhibits per year in a 2500-square-foot section called The Morph Gallery.