ARTKIDS

MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN, by Natasha Schlesinger, ArtKids

A Definite must on the list of places to visit with your kids this season. Museum of Arts and Design has just re-opened its doors to the public at 2 Columbus Circle with wonderful and exciting exhibitions. The exhibition “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary” on the 4th and 5th floor of the museum is particularly amusing for both adults and kids as works tickle our senses and imagination and invite numerous oohs and aahs from the viewers. Art is jam-packed into the two floors and the materials used or re-used by artists are both ordinary and surprising.

Paul Villinski, My Back Pages, 2006-2008
Vintage vinyl records, record player, wire, record covers
Dimensions variable
Photo: Anna Beeke

Kids and parents will be charmed by “My Back Pages” by Paul Villinski, 2006-08, where the artist’s old records were transformed into butterflies fluttering off the wall. The artist, we are told, actually listened to each record before its transformation. Elsewhere there are more records to be found but these used by the artist Jean Shin in his installation Sound Wave.

Come armed with some ordinary objects that kids can look for in the exhibition: buttons, latex gloves, quarters, eye glasses, plastic spoons, rubber bands, small shopping bags. Give your kids a quarter and have them locate a work that is made entirely of quarters and they will be amused to find a daybed made of these coins. Or see if you can locate portraits made of spools of colorful thread and black plastic combs. How about ordinary plastic spoons and rubber bands? These are found making a very fragile looking pyramid by Jill Townsley next to sculptures carved out of phonebooks and catalogues by Long-Bin Chen. One of the most creative is a stalagmite-looking sculpture called Bluffs created out of clear plastic buttons by Tara Donovan and the wonderful tree world created by Yuken Teruya from designer shopping bags, both a reminder of our environmental dilemma and consumerism and its widespread effect. This exhibition stretches our imagination and reveals the worries of our world.