Seattle Dance Collective continues its second season with the fourth of five pieces, Musings by Amanda Morgan. As usual, the piece premiered online on a Thursday. But by now, the individual pieces are beginning to feel like a program that is organized along a gradient of tradition. Beginning with the beautifully filmed ballet Home, the pieces become progressively more experimental. A Headlamp or Two felt like a film whose content happened to be dance. Musings feels like a multimedia artwork in which the media are film, dance, and spoken word.
Seattle Dance Collective continues its second season with the third of five pieces, A Headlamp or Two by Beth Terwilleger. On July 16, this unusual dance premiered, like the rest of them, online. But although every piece in the program so far has made good use of location and format to create something different from you would see on a regular season stage, A Headlamp or Two felt like film first and dance second. Which, considering how rarely those two art forms play well together, was lovely.
When my daughter was in the first grade, her teacher used this worksheet to teach them story structure. Never mind that I never had a lesson in story structure in any grade. Even studying story as an adult, this is still one of the most efficient ways to diagram a narrative that I’ve seen. I’ve hung onto the worksheet because I think it’s useful.
Little did I suspect when I watched the final performance of Yardbirdat Seattle Opera that it would be the last performance anyone saw at McCaw Hall for the foreseeable future. Like many others, I had tickets to see Pacific Northwest Ballet’s new program 1000 Pieces the following weekend. But two days before the program was to premiere, the governor shut down all large gatherings. In the midst of pandemic, it was a minor tragedy, but it wasn’t a total loss. In fact, it turned into a special event, the memory of which I will both cherish and grieve.
If I was traveling with anyone else, I probably would not have gone there. But since my companion was a 10-year-old who asked for “chances to make art” for her special trip to Norway, the International Children’s Art Museum (Det Internasjonale Barnekunstmuseet) in Oslo was the first stop on our itinerary. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t expect much. People always underestimate kids.
The International Children’s Art Museum
Nearly every city has a children’s museum these days, and
sometimes art museums have sections or special exhibits for children. But as
far as I know, the International Children’s Art Museum in Oslo is the only art
museum in the world dedicated entirely to children. Even if it is not, this museum
is still unique because it’s not just showing art to children, it’s showing art by
children.
Established in 1986 by film director Rafael Goldin and his
wife, Dr. Alla Goldin, the museum (colloquially known as Barnekunst) collects,
preserves, and displays art by children. They have a massive collection of art
from over 180 countries. Only a small fraction of it is on display at any given
time in the museum, a large converted house in a quiet suburban neighborhood of
Oslo that houses the embassies of many small nations.
The Museum Experience
Nearly every inch of the big, old house is covered in art.
Some of it is original works on small, framed pieces of paper. Some of the
pieces have been blown up and printed on giant posters for better viewing. One
small room houses sculptures while other rooms are dedicated to rotating themed
exhibitions and displays from the permanent collection. The top floor straddles
the line between wonderland and creepy, with red walls and a huge collection of
dolls from around the world. The basement houses a gift shop and work room
where children can create their own art and participate in regularly held weekend
workshops.
Barnekunst was our first stop in Oslo after picking up our Bergen Cards at the tourist information center. We arrived in the late morning of an April Tuesday, just as some others were leaving. Aside from the woman working the front desk, they were the only other people we saw during our visit. You could easily view the entire museum in half an hour, but to really take it all in, you have move slowly. We ended up staying nearly three hours.
We left our shoes in the cubbies by the door and explored
the museum in our socks. The friendly staff person at the front desk gave us a worksheet
with a scavenger hunt of images from the museum – if you found them all, you
could get a prize. Starting from the basement, we worked our way slowly through
rooms, ending in the uncanny doll room. Along the way, we found a few of the scavenger
hunt items and marveled in awe at the skill of some young artists.
Then we worked our bay back down, looking more closely for the ones we missed. Several of the images on the worksheet were close-up details of larger works and gave us a real challenge. We had to get hints from the lady at the desk to find the last two.
Inspired, my daughter spent nearly an hour at the end of our visit drawing a picture in the work room. She drew a portrait of a gender-fluid child. Since I hadn’t noticed gender as a theme in the museum, I asked her what inspired the choice. She said she couldn’t decide whether to draw a girl or a boy, then realized it didn’t have to be one or the other. Again, I was reminded that youth is not the same as ignorance.
The Art
On our first pass through the museum, we were mostly struck
by the talented kids. We marveled at the technical skill and maturity of some
of the drawings relative to the age of the artist. My daughter’s ego took a few
hits as she repeatedly commented, “That person is my age,” or “That was done by
someone younger than me.”
But as we went back through more slowly, I began to pay more
attention to the way the work was grouped. Not all of it was technically
superior. Some 13-year-olds’ pictures looked like first grade scribbles, and after
a while, you even began to see that overall, a certain level of skill and
detail generally matched up with age.
But you also began to notice the way geography tended to influence style. Children from South Asia and Africa tended to use brighter colors, art in a cartoon style was more likely to be from East Asia. Regardless of technique or style, the pictures often revealed the inner workings of the artist’s mind. Whether it was a stick figure that somehow captured the anguish of getting lost or an impressionistic painting of a father’s yelling face, these images had just as much emotional weight as the work hanging in other museums.
The Impact
Sometimes the choice of subject matter revealed that childhood
is not the uniformly naïve and unburdened experience adults like to imagine.
Among the robots and superheroes and spaceships were also pictures of farm work,
hunting for food or hauling water, and anxiety for the future. Individual works
were sometimes very compelling, and sometimes Regardless of whether an
individual works was compelling of itself or became so through the careful
curation and context of museum display, the end result was as effective as any
exhibition of professional works. Perhaps it was even more so for being so
unexpected.
When we were done, my daughter got to pick a prize. She chose a postcard of one of the paintings that I had liked. It sits on my desk now as a reminder that anyone can make good art.
