What it is
The i.d.e.a. Museum is Mesa’s children’s museum, run by the city, in a converted 1950s supermarket on Pepper Place, two blocks north of Main Street and the Mesa Arts Center. The acronym stands for imagination, design, experience and art, which is the museum’s whole program: it began at the end of the 1970s as the Arizona Museum for Youth, the first children’s museum in the country devoted to fine art, and when it rebuilt itself in 2014 it kept the art and added design and making. About 20,000 square feet of exhibition space is split between the HUB, a permanent gallery of open-ended play and building areas for the youngest children, and a themed exhibition that changes a few times a year, with staffed studio tables where children paint, sculpt and construct things to carry home.
It is not a science center and it does not try to be one. There are no rocket simulators and very few screens. The exhibits are tactile, slow and built for the under-eights, and the museum is small enough that a parent can sit down.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale has no children’s museum (our kids note works around that with parks and the Railroad Park), and because the two Mesa museums together make a day. This is the gentle half, for the toddler and the kindergartener, and the Arizona Museum of Natural History two blocks east is the loud half, with the dinosaurs for their older sibling. In July and August, when the summer playbook says to be indoors from eleven to four, this is one of the places to be.
The practical version
Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town via the 101, the 202 and Country Club Drive, with its own parking lot. Open from 9 AM Tuesday through Saturday and Sunday afternoons, closed Mondays. Admission is a flat per-person price, free under one. Ninety minutes to two hours. Main Street’s lunch places are a two-block walk.
When to go
9 AM on a weekday is the hour that makes this museum worth the drive: the doors open, the HUB is empty, and your two-year-old has the building to themselves until the preschool groups arrive. Weekend afternoons are busy and fine. Summer is the peak season for the obvious reason, and the museum’s air conditioning does the work the desert cannot. The themed exhibition changes a few times a year, so a return visit in a different season is a different museum.
What to do
Start in the HUB, the permanent gallery, which is built around open-ended materials: blocks, ramps, light tables, a stage, things to stack and sort. Then the themed exhibition, which at this writing is about absurd and whimsical art, with children cast as art detectives and asked to invent creatures. The studio tables are the point of the whole museum: real paint, real clay, a staff member who knows how to talk to a four-year-old about color, and a project to take home. Budget half your visit for them and dress accordingly.
The neighborhood
Pepper Place is two blocks from Main Street. Worth Takeaway does the sandwiches; the Mesa Arts Center plazas, with their shade and water channel, are the place to eat them. The light rail’s Center/Main station is a short walk, and for a child who has never ridden a train, one stop to Mesa Drive and back is a free attraction.
The story
In 1978 a group in Mesa chartered a nonprofit called the Arizona Museum for Youth with an idea nobody else in the country had tried: a children’s museum devoted to fine art, where the galleries hung real paintings at a child’s eye level and the programs taught children to look and to make. It opened to the public around 1980 and settled, eventually, into a 1950s grocery store on Pepper Place that the city refurbished into roughly 20,000 square feet of galleries. For three decades it ran as a hybrid, half art museum for children and half studio school, under the City of Mesa.
By the 2010s the children’s-museum field had moved toward hands-on everything, and the museum rebuilt itself to meet it without abandoning the art. On February 6, 2014, it reopened as the i.d.e.a. Museum, with the HUB as a permanent play gallery, a rotating themed exhibition and the studio program at the center. A year later the light rail arrived two blocks away, and the museum found itself part of a downtown that the Mesa Arts Center, the natural history museum and the restaurants on Main were turning into the East Valley’s best small-city core.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s museums, as the museums note lays out, are grown-up ones: Western art, contemporary art, Frank Lloyd Wright. SMoCA runs good family days, and the Railroad Park is the city’s great toddler attraction, but a Scottsdale family with a four-year-old and a free hot afternoon has always had to leave town, and Mesa’s museum is the closest place built for exactly that child.
Getting there
The 101 south to the 202 east, exit Country Club Drive, south to Main Street, east to Robson Street, north two blocks to Pepper Place; the museum and its lot are on the left. Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town, thirty-five from the Camelback corridor. From Tempe, the Center/Main light-rail station is three blocks; our getting around note covers why the rail is a Tempe option and not a Scottsdale one.