ByGD
We woke up early on Saturday morning in Bergen. Our entire Norway itinerary had been shaped around getting my daughter to the weekend family art workshops in the Children’s Art Museum at KODE. But first, we had to find breakfast. And in Bergen, that turned out to be harder than we expected, but in the search, we discovered another Bergen treasure, the Farmers’ Market.
ByGD
At Thanksgiving my family went to Hong Kong. Fortunately, our trip fell during a rare week of safe travel. We visited during a lull in protests after the local elections and before the pandemic. Even though the timing of our trip was lucky, getting to Hong Kong was hard.
ByGD
On our second day in Oslo, we visited the Viking Ship Museum (Vikingskipshuset) on the Bygdøy peninsula. When we planned our Norway itinerary, my daughter and I both picked a couple of must-see items that we would accomplish no matter what. The Viking Ship Museum was my first pick. I’ve been to several exhibits of authentic Viking-age artifacts, but boats are (ironically) not so mobile. So the closest I’d gotten to a real Viking ship was the Gokstad reproduction at Viking World in Iceland. Íslendingur is awesome, but the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo displays the actual Gokstad ship.
It’s worth just dedicating an entire day to museums on Bygdøy (or two, since most museums seem to only be open from 10-4 and you can’t fit them all in that window). Bygdøy is called an island, but it’s really a peninsula. You can just drive or take the bus to get there. But it’s more fun (and faster) to take the ferry from the downtown Oslo harbor.
We caught the second ferry of the day at City Hall Pier 3 (tickets were free with our Oslo Passes) and got off at the Dronningen stop. From there it was about a 10-minute walk to the museum through a quiet neighborhood of fancy houses.
The Viking Ship Museum houses three authentic Viking ships that were used to bury their wealthy owners together with the grave goods contained in the ships. The Oseberg ship is the largest of the three and arguably the finest Viking Age find (a farmer dug into it in 1903). Built in Norway around 820 A.D., the clinker-built oak ship had room for 30 oarsmen and was richly ornamented.
The Oseberg ship probably sailed along the coast and up rivers in Southern Norway before being pulled ashore to bury two high-ranking women. One was in her fifties and the other was in her seventies. They were buried on a bed in the ship, along with the richest trove of Viking era grave goods ever found. Whoever they were, at least one of them was extremely important. The grave goods include a functional sled and a highly ornamented horse cart. The Oseberg ship is also notable for being the source of most of the textile remains from the Viking age.
In 1879 two teenagers dug into “The King’s Mound” on their farm to see if there was really anything buried there. They discovered the grave of a Viking king (or an important chieftain, at least) who was buried around 900 A.D. The chieftain was not as wealthy as the Oseberg women, but his burial gifts were still extensive, including shields, small boats, and exotic animals. Compared to Oseberg, the ship is less extravagant in ornamentation, but bigger in size.
It was used for ocean voyages until the chieftain was killed in battle. (This is why they modeled Íslendingur after Gokstad instead of the more famous Oseberg.) Having walked around on its replica in Iceland made the relatively plain Gokstad ship more interesting. It was easier to imaging the ship fitted out with sails and shields, ready to cross the ocean and devastate monasteries.
A farmer found the Tune ship in 1867. It was the first Viking ship to be excavated and is still one of the best-preserved Viking ships in the world. But compared to the other two it mostly serves to illustrate just how amazing the Oseberg and Gokstad ships really are. Not only is the ship itself less complete, but the grave was plundered and the remaining goods are not in great condition.
Even though I’ve already seen a lot of Viking artifacts, the items at the Viking Ship Museum are quite unusual. There wasn’t a lot of overlap with other exhibits, so I still felt like I learned a lot – for example, I always wondered what Viking shoes looked like, and now I know. There were several documentaries on loop in the museum, including one about textiles, which was all new information for me.
A normal person with only a passing interest in the Viking age would probably be satisfied with half an hour in the museum. But I had to read every single plaque and watch every film in its entirety. We spent well over two hours there, not counting the gift ship, where many items were purchased. I have no regrets.
A Penny Saved
We visited the museum using our Oslo Passes, which more than paid for themselves on our museum-focused itinerary. But if you’re only going to visit a couple of museums, your ticket from the Viking Ship Museum grants free entry to the Historical Museum, Norway’s largest collection of historical artifacts, including Viking treasures, Egyptian mummies and a multitude of ethnographic exhibitions, within 48 hours.
ByGD
If I was traveling with anyone else, I probably would not have gone there. But since my companion was a 10-year-old who asked for “chances to make art” for her special trip to Norway, the International Children’s Art Museum (Det Internasjonale Barnekunstmuseet) in Oslo was the first stop on our itinerary. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t expect much. People always underestimate kids.
Nearly every city has a children’s museum these days, and sometimes art museums have sections or special exhibits for children. But as far as I know, the International Children’s Art Museum in Oslo is the only art museum in the world dedicated entirely to children. Even if it is not, this museum is still unique because it’s not just showing art to children, it’s showing art by children.
Established in 1986 by film director Rafael Goldin and his wife, Dr. Alla Goldin, the museum (colloquially known as Barnekunst) collects, preserves, and displays art by children. They have a massive collection of art from over 180 countries. Only a small fraction of it is on display at any given time in the museum, a large converted house in a quiet suburban neighborhood of Oslo that houses the embassies of many small nations.
Nearly every inch of the big, old house is covered in art. Some of it is original works on small, framed pieces of paper. Some of the pieces have been blown up and printed on giant posters for better viewing. One small room houses sculptures while other rooms are dedicated to rotating themed exhibitions and displays from the permanent collection. The top floor straddles the line between wonderland and creepy, with red walls and a huge collection of dolls from around the world. The basement houses a gift shop and work room where children can create their own art and participate in regularly held weekend workshops.
Barnekunst was our first stop in Oslo after picking up our Bergen Cards at the tourist information center. We arrived in the late morning of an April Tuesday, just as some others were leaving. Aside from the woman working the front desk, they were the only other people we saw during our visit. You could easily view the entire museum in half an hour, but to really take it all in, you have move slowly. We ended up staying nearly three hours.
We left our shoes in the cubbies by the door and explored the museum in our socks. The friendly staff person at the front desk gave us a worksheet with a scavenger hunt of images from the museum – if you found them all, you could get a prize. Starting from the basement, we worked our way slowly through rooms, ending in the uncanny doll room. Along the way, we found a few of the scavenger hunt items and marveled in awe at the skill of some young artists.
Then we worked our bay back down, looking more closely for the ones we missed. Several of the images on the worksheet were close-up details of larger works and gave us a real challenge. We had to get hints from the lady at the desk to find the last two.
Inspired, my daughter spent nearly an hour at the end of our visit drawing a picture in the work room. She drew a portrait of a gender-fluid child. Since I hadn’t noticed gender as a theme in the museum, I asked her what inspired the choice. She said she couldn’t decide whether to draw a girl or a boy, then realized it didn’t have to be one or the other. Again, I was reminded that youth is not the same as ignorance.
On our first pass through the museum, we were mostly struck by the talented kids. We marveled at the technical skill and maturity of some of the drawings relative to the age of the artist. My daughter’s ego took a few hits as she repeatedly commented, “That person is my age,” or “That was done by someone younger than me.”
But as we went back through more slowly, I began to pay more attention to the way the work was grouped. Not all of it was technically superior. Some 13-year-olds’ pictures looked like first grade scribbles, and after a while, you even began to see that overall, a certain level of skill and detail generally matched up with age.
But you also began to notice the way geography tended to influence style. Children from South Asia and Africa tended to use brighter colors, art in a cartoon style was more likely to be from East Asia. Regardless of technique or style, the pictures often revealed the inner workings of the artist’s mind. Whether it was a stick figure that somehow captured the anguish of getting lost or an impressionistic painting of a father’s yelling face, these images had just as much emotional weight as the work hanging in other museums.
Sometimes the choice of subject matter revealed that childhood is not the uniformly naïve and unburdened experience adults like to imagine. Among the robots and superheroes and spaceships were also pictures of farm work, hunting for food or hauling water, and anxiety for the future. Individual works were sometimes very compelling, and sometimes Regardless of whether an individual works was compelling of itself or became so through the careful curation and context of museum display, the end result was as effective as any exhibition of professional works. Perhaps it was even more so for being so unexpected.
When we were done, my daughter got to pick a prize. She chose a postcard of one of the paintings that I had liked. It sits on my desk now as a reminder that anyone can make good art.
ByGD
I have officially reached the age where my memory of the world as it was makes dealing with the world as it is challenging. I simply can’t wrap my head around the idea of paying extra for a seat on a plane. Isn’t that literally what a plane ticket is supposed to get you? Even if I wasn’t opposed on moral and grammatical grounds, these days my budget gives me two choices: travel as cheaply as possible or stay home. Which is how I ended up with two basic economy tickets to Norway in April.
Read More