Elizabeth Mitchell performing at Free First Saturday in 2005

Working with musicians and performers is one of my favorite parts of programming for Free First Saturday . The upcoming Free First Saturday, on November 6,  we have invited special musical guest Elizabeth Mitchell to join us for the day.  Her partner Daniel Littleton and their daughter Storey have been on the road for several months performing as a family and promoting their new album Sunny Day.  Somewhere between New York and California Elizabeth took the time to answer a few questions about her childhood and what she is doing to raise her own kid creatively.

1. How did you express creativity as a child?

I studied modern dance from the time i was six years old. My mother first took me to a ballet class when I was five, but I was not made for ballet! I remember my favorite part of the ballet class being the end, when the teacher would bring a bag of small plastic animals, and we could reach in blindly and choose an animal, then dance as that animal. The ballet teacher looked at my mother at the end of the term with a kind smile and said “maybe try modern with this one.” From that time on I went to class twice a week and loved every minute. I was not a technically “good” dancer, but that was not the point. I was moving my body and it was feeding my soul! And I was learning to express myself, in an abstract, nonlinear way. For me, that was the beginning of my life as an artist

2. What was your favorite book?

“The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I was fascinated by the idea of things being hidden, the little boy hidden away in the house, the garden hidden behind the tall stone walls. I think I found that very romantic and subsequently did a lot of excited imagining that there was much hidden beyond what I saw.

3. What kinds of music did your parents play around the house?

Equal parts Ella Fitzgerald interpreting the great American songbook and the acoustic folk music of the 1970s. Ella was my mother’s favorite singer, but she also loved Simon and Garfunkel, Carole King and James Taylor. We had those albums on vinyl. But then, come 1978, it was the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever all year long, and on an 8 track tape!

4. Were you encouraged early-on by your family or teachers?

Always, by both my family and teachers. My elementary school music teacher gave me a lot of love and encouragement, and was an enormous part of my musical path. She was a thing of radiant beauty to me, her wide eyes and smile, playing Beatles and Joni Mitchell songs on the piano while we all sang along, sitting on a masking taped circle on the floor. She was joyful and relaxed and made me love to sing. It was the 1970s and there was still a lot of support for the arts in public schools at the time. In my memory, we had music class everyday.

5. How would you describe the art that you made as a child? What kinds of materials did you use? Any unusual ones?

I remember constantly making collages. I loved cutting up and piecing found things together, to make something new. Newspaper, yarn, leaves, layering tissue paper, old photographs, seashells, fabric, anything. I think the music that I make today is a form of collage, taking bits of inspiration from many different sources and influences, juxtaposing moments of sound from entirely different eras, cultures and genres, and creating new conversations between generations of music.

6. What was the best gift you got as a child, and who gave it to you?

My grandmother had a best friend named Katie Minton. She was an elderly but very spirited woman who lived alone. We would go visit her and she would always give us something of hers when we left- an old postcard, a piece of costume jewelry, a little box. It taught me to love giving, to be generous and unattached to my things.

Elizabeth Mitchell and Daniel Littleton

7. What was your first job?

When I was a teenager I worked at a fruit stand at a local farm. I grew up in a suburb of New York City so it was a rare thing to have a working farm in our town. But it was my favorite place to be. I loved spending the day surrounded by basil, tomatoes, corn, peaches, it was sensory heaven for me.  The customers were funny though, women who would ask for a tomato that would be ripe in exactly three days! The woman who ran the farm became a second mother to me, she was from Sweden and worked harder than anyone I knew at the time.

8. What song did you —or do you —always include on mixed tapes?

Three songs- Cucurrucucu Paloma, by Caetano Veloso, Djorolen by Oumou Sangare and Bela Fleck, and Raccoon and Possum by the Seeger Family.

9. What’s the coolest thing about being on road? What’s the hardest?

The coolest part is meeting so many amazing and beautiful children and families everywhere we go. People often share stories with us of how our music has affected their lives, and those words truly keep us going. The hardest part is being away from home and trying to find healthy food in the USA!

10. What was the first instrument you learned to play?

I started studying piano at age 5. I had a year of music theory before I even started playing the instrument. I can still remember the light and the colors of that room where I had theory lessons.

11. What instruments do you still play?

A little piano, guitar, harmonium, and lots of percussion. If I could do it all over again, I would be a drummer! Drummers have the most fun.

12. What’s the family favorite bedtime story?

There is a story my husband Daniel and my daughter Storey made up, called “The Land of Blue Clouds.” All kinds of magical things happen there, it changes every night. Daniel wrote a song about it called “Blue Clouds”, that was featured in the HBO Family Documentary “A Family is A Family is A Family.” It came right before a Frank Sinatra song, so we got billing over Frank Sinatra, which was cool!

Elizabeth and Storey

Edith Ackermann

Part of the Designing Play program series, developmental psychologist Edith Ackermann visits the Walker this Thursday to address the topic: Playful Inventions and Explorations: What’s to be learned from kids? (Thursday, April 22nd, 7 pm, Cinema, Free). Ackermann has studied under Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist renowned for his studies on child development and has devoted her research to exploring the relationship between play, learning, design, and technology at MIT’s Media Lab, the LEGO Learning Institute, and most recently at the Exploratorium Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco, California. Below is the second part of an interview with Ackermann, click here for part 1.

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What happens when you design with, rather than for kids?

When you design with, rather than for kids there’s a better chance to come up with a solution that fits the children, provided the designers don’t surrender their expertise to come up with surprising solutions, and the children are given the elbow-room and time to let designers know what they really care about (beyond the contrived context of usability studies). Easier said than done! When it comes to innovating for others, don’t guess what they want or do what they say: co-create what they—and you—will love once it is there!

Playscapes Activity at February 2010 Free First Saturday "Let's Play!" Photo by Gene Pittman

What’s your earliest play memory? Why do you think we remember these experiences?

I always loved to play on the beach with my sister. We spent hours building castles and entire cities, using buckets to moisten and shape the sand. We collected stones, sticks, and shells for decoration. It was also fun to dig holes in the sand till they were deep enough for the water to appear at the bottom, and then to widen the walls to form puddles big enough for us to sit in – and our dolls to swim in. Not to mention the joy of covering ourselves up in the sand, letting only our heads stick out, and then running into the water to rinse off! Looks like the beach is a perfect playground for old and young to have fun together….

Why is play important, and what can adults learn from kids’ play?

Play, like imagination itself, requires an appreciation of things in their unreality, a desire to move outside the comfort zone. Through pretense and fantasy play, children detach messages, experiences, and objects from their context of origin, creating a new frame that allows for greater freedom, interactivity, and creative possibilities. As they tweak the constraints of a situation [respecting and transgressing rules], they feel free to move, engage with new contexts and open up their experience to unexpected possibilities.

People, young and old, need fun, humor, poetry, pretense, and make-believe. They seek to cross boundaries, widen their horizon, and feel ‘transported’. They love to know what’s NOT THERE and take a walk on the wild side.

Do you think there’s a deficit of play in the lives of children or adults? If so, what’s your suggested antidote?

We seem to witness both an overkill of entertainment—and its pedagogical servant: edutainment—and a lack of open-ended and constructive play—and its pedagogical equivalent—genuine “hard fun”: the ability to move or operate freely in a bounded space. The metaphor of the “leap” is often used to capture the sense of exuberance and freedom that characterize children’s play, as well as its boundary-crossing nature. Problem is:  We can’t just leap without a place to land, and there would be no levity without gravity.  It is in this deep sense that play is not merely an escape from reality but the freedom to participate in, transform and be transformed by the world.

As John Holt put it  “Children use fantasy not to get out of, but to get into, the real world”. It is their way of understanding it and coming to grips with their experience, turning it over and owning it. To play is to become a part of a reality in constant transformative engagement with itself. Play does not disappear with adulthood, nor is it a luxury reserved to poets and artists alone.

Father/son team designing a model on Google SketchUp. Photo by Ashley Duffalo

What are your thoughts on technology’s effect on children living in the digital age?

Question is: what do “we” mean by technologies. In Allan Kay’s words: grown-ups tend to call “technology” any tool that was invented after “they” are born. Not so for children! Born into a world filled with human-made artifacts (from spoons to buzzers, from electric appliances to remote-controls, from tree-houses to interactive toys), Children have no preconceived ideas of what’s high-tech or low-tech, animate or inanimate, physical or digital. Instead, they build their own categories as they gravitate toward and come to experience useful and fun things to play with. Children, in other words, re-purpose intended uses and appropriate the tools and toys at their avail to support them in own their relentless desire to play and learn. Obviously staring at a computer screen day in day out won’t get the kids moving, nor, for that matter, will sitting in a library, in a car,  or in a classroom for hours in a row.

What’s your perspective on the relationship between kids and their senses these days? Is the profusion of screens (TV, computer, mobile phones, etc) making them afraid to get their hands dirty?

The profusion of screens seems to have the paradoxical effect that today’s children are more than ever obsessed with getting their hands in the dirt! Unlike their parents or grand-parents (the TV watchers), many so-called “digital natives” (the young cyber-geeks) are, in fact, reclaiming their mobility (cell phones, iPods) and their territory (digitally-augmented physical places, locative and ubiquitous computing). They form a new culture of makers, hobbyists, bricoleurs, pro-ams, fabricators and tinkerers –who care about things because they know how to fix, mend, personalize, and recycle things. They are also a culture of participation – people who share their creations; and who borrow, remix, address and swap their creations. They build on each other’s contributions all the time…

It has become commonplace to think of young people as “geeks” who spend their lives playing on line and browsing the web. While many still do, today’s tinkerers also design, create, and invent: they move between worlds (digital, physical, virtual), they mess with materials, and they care for their environment. While worried parents fear for their senses, the children ironically show us the way.

Developmental Psychologist, Edith Ackermann

With their boundless curiosity, fertile imagination, and a natural mastery of the art of self-directed learning, children have much to teach adults about creativity and innovation. That’s perhaps even more true with today’s “digital natives,” says developmental psychologist Edith Ackermann, whose work explores—and exploits—the intersections of play, learning, design, and technology. An educator and researcher, Ackermann has consulted for LEGO and the LEGO Learning Institute for more than 20 years and worked under the direction of Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist renowned for his studies on children and play, at the Centre International d’Epistémologie Génétique. She has taught at Harvard, MIT, and other universities.

Part of the Designing Play program series, Edith Ackermann visits the Walker this spring to address the topic: Playful Inventions and Explorations: What’s to be learned from kids? (Thursday, April 22nd, 7 pm, Cinema, Free) Here’s a snippet of a  Q&A we exchanged over email…I’ll post more in the weeks leading up to her talk.

How would you summarize your professional relationship to play, children’s learning, and design?

Ever since I was a student, and started working with children, I have been wondering: why are children such good learners? How do they do it? And what are they learning about as they apparently “mindlessly” and playfully interact with their world?  Later in life, I shifted gears from studying how children act, think, and learn to designing environments for children to act, think and learn in. Two lessons I have learned:

1) Children may not have much experience or knowledge (at least not as much as grown-ups or older siblings) but they sure are born with a knack to do “the right thing” in order to get to know more about what they don’t know yet.

2) Children learn all the time and everywhere – in school, at home, on-line. And the best part, they learn a great deal even as they are playing! Alas, they learn especially well as they are playing. As the saying goes, play is a child’s most serious work!

Whose ideas/philosophies have been most influential to your work?

I owe much to my mentor Jean Piaget and his colleagues from the CIEG (Centre International d’Epistemologie Genetique) in Geneva who taught me to appreciate, understand, and elicit children’s ways of thinking (through a technique known as clinical exploration), and to create conditions that fuel their interests and leverage their potential through indirect teaching, or design.

I also learned from Seymour Papert and the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab to emphasize the importance of situated and embodied cognition, and to explore the potential of digital technologies as a means to mediate and leverage children’s talents as self-directed learners and creative thinkers.

Above all, I seek collaborations with individuals and teams who take it as their task to rethink the links between curiosity, imagination and creative expression and who “walk the talk” by bringing delight and lightness into the should-driven world of educators or the humorless exposés by scholars of human creativity. Some heroes include designers and artists Bruno Munari, Toshi Iwai, Fischli und Weiss, poet and writer Gianni Rodari, The Reggio Emilia infant and toddler schools, and the Exploratorium Science Museum.

What has been one of your most memorable/favorite projects?

One of my favorite projects is happening right now, at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco, CA. As an Osher fellow, I have been able to spend significant chunks of time working with colleagues from the “playful inventions and explorations” group, also known as PIE.

While not intended exclusively for children, PIE tinkering activities are unique in their abilities to put imagination and playfulness at the service of knowledge and reasoning. The result is exquisite. You may enjoy a peek into some of the PIE projects, such as  “wind-powered wonders”, “light reflections”, and “scribbling machines” by visiting the website: http://www.exploratorium.edu/pie/ideas.html

In your mind, how is design like play?

Both design and play involve breaking loose from habitual ways of thinking, and making dreams come true! This, in turn, requires 1. an ability to imagine how things could be beyond merely describing or representing how things are (ask what if, do as if, inventing alternative ways); and 2. a desire to give form or expression to things imagined, by projecting them outward (thus making otherwise hidden ideas tangible and shareable). Both are about building and iterating. Messing around with materials, or giving the head a hand often sparks a maker’s imagination and sustains her interest and engagement: you get started and the ideas will come. You persevere and the ideas will fly.

What are the pitfalls of designing for kids (i.e. toys, play environments)?

Nothing is harder than to design environments for other people to design in. And the reason for this is that bells and whistles, ease of use, or age appropriate-ness alone won’t make for meaningful interactions. In order to grab a child’s attention and sustain her interest, a toy needs to have “holding power”, a term introduced by Papert to describe its ability to grow with the child (I grow with my toys and my toys grow with me). Favorite playthings – or playground – can be many things. Yet to hold active engagement, they should be: open enough to let you in; intriguing enough to capture your imagination; safe enough to let you enact otherwise risky ideas; and generous enough to always give you a second chance. While guidelines such as these are useful, they offer no warranty for success:  the children may still ignore a toy especially designed for them—and what’s a hit for one kid may leave another cold.

Kids Play Space in the Walker's Local Artist Gift Mart, Target Gallery, December 6, 2009. Photo: Gene Pittman

I love the work of Calef Brown. For years I have been amazed as a room full of kids suffering from some serious cabin fever listen intently to Brown’s poems, or stories as he calls them. But seriously, how could they resist bats pooping on people? The illustrations and words weave together and create stories within stories. It’s magical how Brown inspires kids’ imaginations. The kids would take a poem like Skeleton Flowers, which is about what it sounds like, and turn it into an elaborate world of monster bees that use the pollen from the flowers to turn people into zombies. In response to the poem about Ed who likes red the kids thought that if he married a girl who likes green then he wouldn’t look so sad. I could go on forever… Mother of two, Heather Armstrong of the super blog Dooce, sums it when she proclaims Polkabats and Octopus-Slacks “is pure genius.”

So you can understand my enthusiasm when the opportunity came to bring Calef Brown to the Walker. Local musician Kate Lynch and Chris Beaty, aka Clemetown, created a musical versions of Brown’s Polkabats and Octopus Slacks and Dutch Sneakers and Flea-Keepers. On January 2 Calef, Clemetown, a funky snowman, and some others will take the stage at Free First Saturday for a performance filled with music, live drawing, stories, and lots of dancing.

In the meantime I asked Calef some relevant (and some not so relevant) questions about his childhood and life as a father.

What was your imaginary friend like?
A stock car-driving-cat named Cannonball

How did your family influence your career?
Everyone in my family has a good sense of humor. We’ve always been able to make each other laugh. The nonsensical spirit of my books is very influenced by that.

What was your favorite bedtime story?
I had lots of favorites, but for a while I especially liked A Tale of Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter, because it involves ransacking, and the name Hunca Munca cracked me up.

What was your first pet like?
A wonderful German Shepard mix named Dickens. She was hit by a car and lost one of her front legs, but she still got around okay and lived a long life.

When did you realize you wanted to be an artist?
I have always loved to draw and paint since age 5 or 6, but in high school I realized that it was the only thing that I was good at, so I should give it a go as a career.

What’s your favorite line of poetry?
Do I search for what is not?
Vainly, vainly have I sought?
Or in searching do I find,
The end that so eludes my mind?

My father wrote that when he was in college.

What surprised you most about fatherhood?
I’m more patient and competent than I thought I would be.

What superpower would you like to have?
Flying.

Who’s your favorite villain?
Gollum and the Grinch, who both turn non-villainous.

What did you want to be growing up?
Aside from an artist, a rock musician and/or a racecar driver.

What was your favorite Saturday morning cartoon?
Rocky and Bullwinkle

What Disney character most resembles your personality?
I can’t think of a Disney character that I like, I never got the appeal, so for the part of my psyche that’s self-critical and doubting, that can be Donald Duck.

What was your first job?
I was a counselor at a small co-op day camp called Camp Goochy Gotch. My younger sister Phebe came up with the name of the camp.

What’s your advice for all the artist/parents out there?
Since I’ve only been a parent for about 6 months I need to get advice, rather than give it.

What’s the first work of art you remember seeing?
My very first memory is of being on a beach in Maine and watching my mother paint a watercolor. The first work of art that made a big impression on me was a painting called Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War by Salvador Dali. I saw it at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when I was eight or nine and it blew my mind. Very scary, but fascinating.

What question do you wish we had asked you?
I wish you had asked me about what kind of pie I like and why,
because I like eating veggie pie. Want to know the reason why?
The reason is the cheese inside the peas inside the crust.
Tasty peas are stuffed with cheese until they nearly bust.
For those who haven’t tried it yet, you absolutely must!
Especially with cheese inside the peas inside the crust.

Dan Graham, New Space for Showing Videos 1995 T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2002

Mirror, Mirror Art project

Hello, I’m Alanna, the new Family Programs intern, assisting with Free First Saturday. I’ll be posting periodically on events relating to Raising Creative Kids, as seen from my behind-the-scenes perspective in the Education and Community Programs Department. For my first blogging assignment I decided to sit down with Ilene Krug Mojsilov, The Walker’s Art Lab Coordinator to see how the upcoming Dan Graham exhibition would be used to fuel a creative art activity that she’s designed for Nov 7^th Free First Saturday.

Dan Graham is a conceptual artist, among many things—a photographer, performer, video artist and critic. He has been working since the 1960’s in New York and is considered a pioneering figure in many modes of art. His retrospective, Dan Graham: Beyond, organized by the Museum of Contemporary art, Los Angeles opens at The Walker on Oct 31.

A lot of Dan Graham’s pieces are works of installation. How do you get kids to understand the concept of an installation?

Well first I get them to define the word “install.” I start out with the question: “Who knows what it means to install something? I liken the idea to a kitchen that needs to be redone and how an object like a stove, fits in the space.

Dan Graham’s work often challenges viewer’s perceptions. He creates environments where the viewers see themselves and are seen by others. Tell me how your art activity relates to this idea of perception.

The activity is called Mirror, Mirror. It is made from human-made materials, different from natural materials. Plastic, glass, lumber, steel, and metal are examples of elements used in architecture. I ask children to manipulate materials like plastic, Mylar, and foam core so that they can envision what a space could be. In this way, the art becomes self-reflective, as they can infuse their own lives in it. I ask the kids to use three different types of surfaces, transparent, meaning material you can see through; translucent, material you can see partially through; and opaque, material you cannot see through.

What are the reasons or intentions behind the project?

I like people to play with the idea of space by using materials that play with light.

We all perceive space differently. Light and shadow are ingredients in this recipe for a space. I also hope that this activity gives participants a way to delineate personal and public space.

How will the kids get this?

I always like to relate an artistic work to their own experience. I tell them, “Think of your bedroom.” In this way, the children are able to use the materials with specific purposes that arise from their own imaginations of familiar places.

Can this work for all ages?

Yes. Older kids can see the project as an interior design project. To younger kids, it can be an outdoor installation. It would be suitable for 3 years olds to teens.

Ilene is giving accessibility to contemporary art. It is a genre I admit I am not familiar with.

This seems to be an experience where the children are introduced to conceptual art without even knowing it. You’re offering an experience where they don’t get bogged down with definitions.

Exactly. They don’t get bogged down with definitions.

We are both smiling

It seems like you enjoy the experiential side of learning.

I like to learn that way…I like when there’s a challenge.

Our conversation dips into discourse about teaching methods. I am beginning to discover Ilene’s passion—her identity as an independent thinker, gutsy, intuitive and someone who discovered her own kinesthetic learning style early in life. She draws on this strength in challenging kids in the creative process.

I want all people to experience the creative process. I do my job because I’m discovering something.

How do you initially think of ideas?

I am inspired by other artists and exhibitions. I think: What could I do with this? What can I take? I borrow from these influences. That’s what makes working in museum education so interesting. There is always something new, a new exhibition…I never get stuck.

Do you ever run out of ideas?

No…like cleaning out my closet. I find new ways of looking at the everyday. That’s always been part of my experience…finding connections to the present.

Using Dan Graham’s exhibit, Mirror Mirror will construct a creative way for children to connect with their present.