There are some very strange creatures in the Museum of Glass’ back gallery. Sporting vibrant fuschias, neon blues and lime greens they’re natives of another planet, one where cats wear pizzas and fish eat molten lava. They’re the 52 pieces of art in “Kids Design Glass,” an exhibition showcasing an ongoing education program at the museum. While they’re made by adults, they’re definitely designed by kids – and the planet they come from is that wild and colorful place called childhood.

The Kids Design program began five years ago as a way of involving kids in making art and educating them as to how glass is worked. Any child could submit a drawing, along with a name and explanation; a volunteer artist or the Hot Shop team would then select one every month and sculpt the design into glass, watched by the young designer who then took home a copy. The program was supposed to be temporary. Thousands of designs later, it has become not only an exhibition but a vehicle for linking artists with children around the region, including patients at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital and those with serious illnesses.

Walking around “Kids Design Glass” you get an immediate idea of why the program is so popular. To have glass – a fragile, expensive medium usually whisked away from kids – suddenly transported into a child’s control is a huge gift. As testament to this, photos of happy designers posing with their artist and sculpture line the walls like party decorations. It’s a brilliant show to take a kid to: all light and color, set low in cases, and with a big whiteboard and markers for spontaneous artistry.

But the exhibition is also a gift to grown-ups. It doesn’t follow any thematic formula; instead it explodes down the long gallery like a paintbrush spatter. The creatures draw you from case to case, each one more cool than the next. There’s a large undersea contingent: the suavely striped “The Octopusy” with five audaciously red legs, the lava-eating “Fire Fish” with a fin like a fluttery red nudibranch, the deep-blue shark with a mouth like a hell-hot garbage truck. There’s quite a population of aliens, too, from the amiable “Recycle Robot” to a large green sluglike “Gop-Thing,” and a number of friendly monsters, not to mention all the mixed-up mythological creatures with pickle bodies and squid tails or turtles growing flowers on their shells.

Some of the glass artists – who include luminaries Lino Tagliapietra, Preston Singletary, Dante Marioni and the like – have imposed a glittery sophistication that the original didn’t quite have, and some have transformed the drawing’s unique expressions into standardized circular eyes and noses. But most have been faithful to their subjects.

Martin Blank is one of these. Chatting at the opening reception with his designer, Emma Lynne Foster, 11, Blank was adamant that he made exactly what Foster wanted, even Skyping with her to talk about little details. From the packet of designs he was given, Blank picked out Foster’s “Sequoia God,” luminescently purple with a dignified tangle of twigs growing from his head, at the time that he himself was working on the glass log in the “Fluent Steps” installation on the plaza. Foster, for her part, said it was “really an honor, and really cool” to have her design worked out in glass.

The program may also benefit glass art itself, in a way. Carl Fisher, who with his wife, Jan, sponsored Foster’s sculpture, points out that children are “not constrained by the knowledge of what glass can and can’t do. They think outside the box, which is really important” in creating art.

“Kids Design Glass” is actually too large for one viewing, especially with a young child in tow. But the good part about its otherwise-boringly-long tenure (through February 2011) is that you can go back and back. As a companion to the more serious Singletary show in the other gallery, it’s ideal for showing off the innate shiny silliness of glass. And the Kids Design program is ongoing, so that young visitors can move on to the studio and submit their own design – the perfect complement to looking at art.

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568

rosemary.ponnekanti@ thenewstribune.com