Education and Community Programs

Escape to the Suburbs was an awesome day and since pictures are worth a thousand words….

The Elia Chair, brainchild of Michael Gross, was a stand-out hit!

The kid-sized chairs are fun to customize, recyclable, and yielded amazing results!

Kids also got a chance to get their groove on as part of the Flow Motion performance featuring Truth Maze, Dancin’ Dave, DJ Stage One, Autumn Compton, Arturo Miles, Debra McGee, and Aaron Barnell.
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In addition be being awed by the talent, I heard one of the coolest versions of the ABC song ever!

I always enjoy watching the kids diligently work away as they did at the Satellite Suburbs activity, where kids got to create their own aerial view of a suburb by making a collage with satellite images of Twin Cities’ suburbs.

The project was designed by Ilene Krug Mojsilov in relation to the Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes exhibit.

Thanks to all the volunteers, artists, and participants that made it one of those days when, at the end of the day, I think…Wow!

This week the blogs Daddy Types and Stork Bites Man featured a couple of interesting coloring books, The Torture Device Coloring Book and The Lousy Animals and Friends Coloring Book . And it got me thinking about the coloring book conundrum. Are coloring books the nemesis of creativity that authors, like Susan Striker suggests? Many parents cringe at the images that perpetuate stereotypes. Coloring books play a vital part in an endless, daily stream of advertising that bombard children. So they are bad, right?

When I was teaching, coloring books and coloring sheets were just short of forbidden in my classroom. Sheets of blank paper for the young minds to explore in anyway they saw fit (occasionally with large quantities of white glue and nothing else) were piled high in corners of the room. Nevertheless, children would present me with a coloring sheet of some Disney character like they were offering me their soul. I would wince and graciously accept the work.

Free First Saturdays at the Walker have taught me that when you're designing projects for 450 kids in a five-hour period, "templates" are inevitable. And now I am beginning to wonder if coloring books could be seen as a form of appropriation. If Sherrie Levine can create a bronze cast of a urinal and have it considered appropriation, should kids be allowed to appropriate Cookie Monster? Perhaps I was wrong to underestimate the value of a meticulously traced and gently colored Cinderella. After all, Cinderella was wearing a neon-green dress not the classic blue, so she made an artistic decision to alter it. Coloring books might be a way to talk about contemporary art with kids.

As for the advertising and stereotypes issues, maybe the solution to those issues is just to offer kids cooler coloring books. What do think?

Nam June Paikʼs wonderful TV Cello now sits quietly up in the Shape of Time exhibition and as I wander in the galleries, I often wonder how cool it would have been to see it in action. What would it sound like if I could hear Charlotte Moorman play it? What was it like to actually see the performance happening?

Nam June Paik,TV Cello, 1971, Formerly the collection of Otto Piene and Elizabeth Goldring, Massachusetts. Collection Walker Art Center, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992.

As several of us were cleaning up after our most recent Arty Pants ended and I was struck with a similar wonder.

Arty Pants goers were presented with paint, paper, a large musical staff mural, foam mallets and some music. As kids streamed into the room, they picked up their mallets and began to bang away. Youngsters got into the flow art-making, literally, as they ran from one end of the large musical staff mural to the other, pounding expressive notes all along the way. A family friendly selection of music provided the sound track for spontaneous dancing through out the morning.

I stared at the large mural we had made that day, but instead of being curious, I knew how cool it was to be in room of more than 100 people experiencing and participating in the moment of art making. Like Nam June Paik’s cello, I am now left with a relic, the musical mural, to remember the sound of creating art.

Thanks to Frannie, Sara, Courtney and Mari for their hard work. And a special shout out to Morgan for the stupendous musical staff!

Arty Pants goers this week got to investigate primary colors, but instead of using paintbrushes we used squirt guns, toothbrushes and toy trucks. Kids got to take aim at their paintings and watch the blue paint drip down the page where it would meet up with some red to make purple. Swirling toothbrushes across the page made textured designs, with red and yellow lines of paint crossing to create vibrant orange pictures. I could definitely tell that the joy of creating and the thrill of discovering how colors mix was in the air as I watched a boy plunk his toy truck down, saturated in blue, and drive it a across an already yellow page. Sure enough, a moment later his head popped up and he cried out “I've made GREEN!” He was no longer only an artist, but an inventor as well.