How to Make a Mini Art Museum for Your Art Class

Having a Mini Art Museum in your classroom is a fun way to teach art history, history, science, and more!  Here are some tips to make your own mini museum and things I would do if I built another one:

1. Find or build a museum.  I found an old, used dollhouse, had it painted and a few of the windows filled in to create more wall space.  Bringing it to workshops and carrying it up and down my studio stairs is sort of awkward because it’s heavy and over 4 feet tall!  In hind sight I wish I would have opted for a more portable size.  If I had the budget and space, I’d get one small house for every 4-6 kids in the class so they could work on teams to create an art exhibit.
2. Add flooring.  You can find printable flooring online.  I chose a herringbone wood floor pattern like The Art Institute of Chicago.  I glued it down and added a few layers of acrylic varnish over the top.

Create or Collect Mini Paintings and Sculptures

Paintings, Photographs, and Other 2D Art:

• • 1. Make or buy a mini frame.  My local frame shop, If These Walls Could Talk in Aurora, IL, had framing scraps and made some frames for me. Many modern artworks don’t have frames so you can just glue them onto a wood piece to size.
    2. Find images online.  Look at the original dimensions and try to print them as much to scale as possible.  (Read more about scale below.)  For example, the Mona Lisa is very small compared to Guernica.  Then, I used tacky glue to glue the artworks to the frame.  Next, I glued on a little piece of thin wood on the back and added the Velcro.  The artworks are coated with a few coats of acrylic medium and varnish.
    3. Lastly, the title, artist and year are printed and glued on the backs of the artworks.

Sculptures and other 3D Art:

4. This is where I got a little carried away.  The first thing I made was a set of Greek vases out of terracotta clay and was planning on making more sculptures on my own, but this was extremely time consuming.  So, I searched online for mini sculptures and replicas.  Most of these I don’t let the younger students touch, but keep for display or for older students.

A Note About Scale:

If you want to create your mini replica artworks exactly to scale, you’ll need to do some math.  For example, if you have a Barbie doll sized house that scale is 1:6 or 1/6.  This means that the objects are 6 times smaller than the object would be IRL.  So, you would find the dimensions of the original artwork and divide them by 6.  Another common dollhouse size is 1:12.  If you have a smaller dollhouse with this scale, you’d divide all the dimensions by 12.  Honestly, I just wing it and base some of the sizes on the size of the pre-made frames.

How to Make Your Mini Art Museum Irresistibly Interactive

The 1st through 5th graders (boys, girls, all of them) LOVED the museum.  It was a big hit and totally engaging.  Here are ways to make your art museum a fun, interactive art history teaching tool.

1. Attach Velcro strips to the walls and art.  This makes it easy to move the artworks.  (At first I used puddy, but that was a mess and hard to move the pieces around.)
2. Paint some 1×4 inch wood blocks to use as pedestals for sculptures
3. Add Dolls.  The dolls took me a while to find.  My students are diverse so I wanted diverse dolls AND dolls that were durable/washable.  A lot of the dolls have yarn for hair which is hard to clean.  I LOVE the wooden dolls I found on Etsy!!  AND, they are based on ARTISTS!  So, the kids learn the names of different artists as well.  Here is a link to order the Famous Artist Peg Dolls on Etsy.

4.  Make or buy museum benches, tables, chairs, cafe food and dishes, couches, etc…

5.  Have students create artworks or replicas for an engaging art history project OR turn it into a museum of natural history, science, a historical society, etc…

I offer art workshops at my Aurora, IL studio and will travel locally, within 150 miles of Chicago, or farther.

Want More Tips to Create a Mini Art Museum?

Check here for more tips and why mini art museums are fun and interactive teaching tools.

Contact me if you would like a mini museum art class or workshop for yourself, art teacher department or students. 

Would you like the mini museum to visit your gallery or museum?  Contact me.