03 Mar, 2010
Ottawa families and museum memberships
Posted by andrea tomkins in: - Ottawa for kids|Easy ways to make kids happy
We just bought a family membership to the National Gallery here in Ottawa. I’ve written about our experiences at the Gallery here before. To summarize: it’s all good.
There is an excellent, you-don’t-want-to-miss exhibition at the Gallery on right now. It is immensely creative and will challenge your traditional ideas of art**. The artist is David Hoffos (official website here).
The girls were stunned (ok, we all were). Imagine walking into a dark room. It’s quiet. Your eyes take a moment to adjust. You follow along a wide corridor, peeking into small windows to see various scenes made up of reflected video loops and miniature replicas of homes/furniture/landscapes. Mind you, we needed to drag around a stepstool for Sarah (which was helpfully provided), but it was, in a word, brilliant.
** Sidebar: I’m sure the deeper artistic meaning behind this installation was explained in an paragraph or two. Can I tell you a secret? I rarely read artist statements. I skip over them because, honestly, it all just sounds like it’s made up. What’s important to me is this: is it different? Is it interesting? Is it memorable? Yes, yes, and yes.
Anyway, yes, the membership. I love having a membership. It gives me the freedom to waltz in and out of the Gallery at will. I never feel cranky or pressured to Make The Most of Our Visit Because We Shelled Out The Big Bucks. Memberships come in handy when you are towing small people around. As we all know, small people’s moods (ahem, as well as our own) can turn on a dime.
- Meltdown? Leave.
- Hungry? Leave.
- [insert whatever emergency you want here] Leave.
I like having the freedom to focus on one section of the Gallery really well and skipping everything else. It’s just much more manageable that way.
The family membership at the Gallery is $95/year. It has some cool benefits (at least to me):
- We don’t pay admission to the permanent collection and to special exhibitions
- Entrance for members is totally “fast track.” (We don’t pay, but do need to check in.) This has come in amazingly handy on the last day of a visiting exhibition. The last time this happened was during the Ron Mueck exhibit. (Remember the giant baby head?) The line up was out the door, past Maman and down the street.
- 15% discount at the gift shop (the Gallery has an amazing gift shop)
- $2 off parking
- exclusive invitations to Members’ Evenings (although I have yet to go to one)
We haven’t bought memberships to any other places here in town. We just don’t go often enough to justify it, but this all got me thinking about the other kid-friendly galleries and museums in Ottawa and how they compared.
Did you realize that a $72 household/family membership gives you unlimited admission to the Canada Science and Technology Museum, the Canada Aviation Museum and the Canada Agriculture Museum at the Central Experimental Farm? (!) More info on that can be found here.
The other biggies in town:
- Canadian Museum of Civilization/Canadian War Museum: (HELLO, is this website hard to use or what? A “duo” family membership for one year is $99 and includes admission to Civilization (as well as the Children’s Museum), to the War Museum, and reduced admission to IMAX showings.)
- Canadian Museum of Nature: Membership is only $65 (!)
By way of FYI, museum memberships make great gifts. My mother bought our first membership to the National Gallery. (Thanks mom!) It is truly the gift that keeps giving.
I know there are families out there who would LIKE to buy a museum pass but just can’t afford it. Here in Ottawa, free museum passes are available from the public library but it is a bit of a good news/bad news kind of situation. Good news is that all you need is a library card. Bad news: the wait list is really long. So if you want to take advantage of this wonderful program at some point in the future, put your name down now.
What about you? Have you invested in a museum membership? Why or why not? Which museums are your favourite destinations?
