May 3, 2007
Constructing Childhood: Children’s art display part of Simpson center project
Growing up is often fun and games, but isn’t always child’s play.
That’s the message of the Reclaiming Childhood events, the latest of which are an art exhibit in Allen Library and a forum for young teens, parents and teachers.
Constructing Childhood, on display through June 23 on the third floor of Allen Library, brings together painting, sculpture, poetry and video art produced by Seattle area middle and high school students.
Cheryll Hidalgo, director of the installation, is the video arts teacher at Seattle Academy of Arts & Sciences, a private school for youngsters sixth through 12th grade. Hidalgo organized the exhibit with Katharyne Mitchell, a UW professor of geography and the Simpson Professor in the Public Humanities.
Mitchell originated the Reclaiming Childhood project, now in its third year, sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities. It’s a collaborative, interdisciplinary project examining changes in American childhood.
The exhibit is mounted on a swing set perched in a sandbox. Video monitors play a series of student films on teenagers. Around the films are 51 abstract drawings, poetry and three-dimensional art on the subject of childhood.
Some of the art is fun, goofy stuff, like Mason jars holding photographs of the Pop Tarts, Coca Cola and McDonald’s french-fries off limits to a teenager when she was younger.
But other art is more serious. A short film, Anxiety, features Seattle Academy student Patrick Tully as he struggles, during the course of several days, to get his school work done, including a film project. Along the way, he pops handfuls of stimulants, becoming more and more bleary-eyed as the hours wear on.
Tully said his anxiousness had been building since early childhood. “This film,” he said, “allowed me to reclaim my life.”
As American culture encourages work, particularly entrepreneurship, the message trickles down to students, and that creates pressure, said Mitchell. Kids are encouraged to set their own learning agendas, and push the limits of a day. Take music lessons not only to learn Mozart but to create a portfolio to get in one “best” school after another.
The Tully film is followed by teens’ advice to parents: encourage, listen to fears, offer help — and never insult.
Hidalgo hopes parents, teachers and teenagers will use Constructing Childhood as a way to talk. She plans to mount audience responses on the exhibit. “Young people don’t have enough opportunities to say what they really think because sometimes adults can’t or don’t want to hear,” Hidalgo said. “This can be a way for kids to talk with the protection of anonymity.”
The project also shows the evolution of childhood in contemporary America. “We’re interested in how people are formed,” Mitchell said. “Especially since children are so malleable in relation to an economic system.”
For additional information on the work, visit www.reclaimingchildhood.org and www.townhallseattle.org.
Constructing Childhood Open House events will be held 1–4 p.m. Saturday, May 12, and 1–4 p.m. Saturday, June 2.
