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Family Outings: At Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, imagination (and ...

We looked down the garden path, and there it was — "Spoonbridge and Cherry," the iconic sculpture by the husband-wife team Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

I had seen the massive fountain sculpture reproduced so many times on postcards, Flikr and the covers of promotional brochures that some of the wow factor had worn off. But the reaction of my preschool-age daughter restored its punch.

"I love cherries!" she yelled as she ran down the path toward a grassy expanse where the cherry loomed out of a duck pond in front of the Minneapolis skyline. She stared up at the mist spraying from the tip of the huge black stem.

"I think it's smoke," she finally pronounced. "If it was raining over there, it would be raining over here, too."

With its tree-lined walkways and more than 40 sculptures, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is a great place to explore with children. They can yell and run and even climb (on certain sculptures) and do all those things that would draw withering looks and worse from docents in an art museum.

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