Kids Curate Funny Faces at the Maier Årt Museum

Kristin Reiber Harris


Last Sunday, at the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, I helped kids curate their own collections from a large group of post cards that had been donated to the museum. They also made these funny faces with post cards we cut up and re-positioned, inspired by the exquisite corpse game of the Surrealists. 

I assist at the Maier as a docent and arts educator for family art programs. One of the current exhibits at the museum is Crowdsourced from the Permanent Collection: Randolph Curates. Randolph College students, faculty and staff were asked to suggest their favorite work from the permanent collection to be included in the exhibition. This show and the wonderful post card collection were the inspiration for this workshop.

When the kids arrived for the workshop, I asked them if they had any collections. As you would expect, there were collections of such things as screws, nails and rocks. The kids came up with a theme and started going through the hundreds of cards to see what they could find. Once they had a good number of cards, they made an accordion fold books to mount and display their collection.

These programs are for families, not just for kids. I especially appreciate when parents stay and participate on their own. I had some mothers and a grandmother also putting together their own collection of post cards. One mother was curating a collection of images of women through the ages and another was collecting images of animals.

When the kids were finished putting their post card collections together (one was images of tulips, another was just "cool stuff" and images of food for Dad) I asked them to help me find post cards of big faces for our funny faces.

Creating new faces can be endlessly entertaining and very informative about our perception. We want to see patterns. Despite the obvious disparities, we see these images a single face and see a new person.

As you can imagine, this is only one set of possible combinations for each of these images. Next time I do this, I'd like to get the kids to write a story about the new person/creature they have created.

 

 

There is a wonderful app that does this same thing with objects from the Los Angeles County Art Museum,  it is Art Swipe. It comes loaded with images from their collection but you can add additional images from LACMA as well as photos from your own photo gallery.

Made in ArtSwipe with images from LACMA's collection