Museum to celebrate Halloween

The Mathers Museum of World Cultures will celebrate Halloween with Family Fun Fest, featuring a variety of crafts, storytelling and hands-on activities, from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday. \nThis is the ninth Family Fun Fest, said Abbie Anderson, the Curator of Education at the museum, who is in charge of the event.\n"I'm having a lot of fun planning our Halloween Family Fun Fest, and we're hoping for a good turnout," Anderson said. She said about 200 people attended the event last year.\nThe museum's Assistant Director Judy Kirk, who was in charge of all the museum's special events at the time, decided to hold a special program on Halloween in 1995. The dangers of trick-or-treating were in the news that year and she wanted to offer the museum as a safe and fun place for concerned parents, Anderson said. \n"Parents have been concerned for years about the potential dangers of their children going door to door at night and accepting gifts from strangers -- gifts that might hide razor blades, or ground glass or poisons," she said. "In the early '90s, people started trick-or-treating at malls and such, so kids could still get dressed up and get treats but do it in a clean, well-lighted place."\nTrends like that were what gave Kirk the idea of holding a special Halloween event at the museum, a place where parents could feel good about bringing their children. The event was so successful that it became an annual fixture at the museum.\nAnderson said many of the same families come to the Fun Fest every year.\n"We like the museum to be a place where people have fun, as well as learn about the different ways of being human," she said. "We especially want families to know that they are welcome here. Plus, if kids learn early on that museums are exciting places to be, they're more likely to remember everything we have to offer as they grow up." \nThe Fun Fest offers different themes each year; this year the museum will focus on festivals of the dead around the world, Anderson said. Some of the events at the Halloween Family Fun Fest will include mask making, potato stamping on Adinkra (West African cloth), Japanese dancing and face painting. For the first time this year, the festival will feature ghost stories from around the world, including stories from Spanish, Japanese, Siberian and Pawnee Indian cultures.\nSenior Christina Conn, an anthropology major, said she plans to have an exhibit of masks she made from around the world in December at Mathers, so she thought the festival would be a fun event to volunteer for. \n"The Mathers always has a mask-making table at the Halloween Fest, so this year I wanted to help out and hopefully keep some of the children's masks to put on display in my exhibit," Conn said. "At the table this year, the kids will have a choice in making Yoruba Egungun masks associated with special annual and biannual funeral ceremonies or free-style masks where they can show their creative side and make whatever type of mask they want or, of course, they could make both," she said. "The children will construct masks out of paper plates and paper, adding whatever decoration they want, using feathers, construction paper and markers. For the Egungun masks, they will tape strips of streamers on a paper plate to represent the colorful strips of clothes that Egungun wooden masks have," Conn said.\nCatherine M. Tucker, who is an assistant professor in the anthropology department, enjoys taking her son to the event. \n"It did provide fun for my son and I, and it's a good activity; I hope it continues," she said. \nThe museum is located at 416 N. Indiana Ave. Parking is available at the McCalla School parking lot on the corner of Ninth Street and Indiana Avenue. Admission is free. For more information about this event or tours at the museum call 855-6873 or visit their Web site at www.indiana.edu/~mathers/.\n-- Contact staff writer Alex Moore at mam3@indiana.edu.