By Alice Perry 5/14 2:34pm

Art Scene

Terence Koh. "the future iz bigger than history." (Photo: Charles Roussel)

Expo 1 at MoMA PS1: A Child’s Playground in Fluxus

Expo 1, which opened Sunday at MoMA PS1, may just turn out to be the most kid-friendly avant-garde exhibition to come along in a while. The show will get your children excited about art, and you won’t stammer once when they ask, “What’s that?” There isn’t a flying penis in sight. No Christ in piss, no Virgin Mary smeared with dung.

All three floors of MoMA PS1 are filled with installations, sculptures, and films. The exhibit’s grand mission—to address “ecological challenges set against the backdrop of economic turmoil and sociopolitical upheaval”—will surely induce a zombie stare in any child (or parent). But if you ask some kids, “Who wants to see a real pond in an old school building?” they’ll be elbowing each other to be first in line. Read More

By Benjamin-Emile Le Hay 9/27/12 3:15pm

Art For All

A mother and child view one of Mr. Power’s pieces. Photo: Christos Katsiaouni.

Chelsea Adult Art Gets Child-Friendly

Two recently-installed gallery shows are attracting some buzz from art aficionados with children.

Visual media artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, just opened a fascinating wall-to-wall light and audio installation titled “Voice Array” at Bitforms Gallery on 20th Street that encourages visitors to interact vocally. Art-goers can go up to an intercom and speak or sing into it and the installation records their voices and remixes it into a matrix of 288 pre-recorded voices and over 500 flashing LED lights.

“Not only can you touch the artwork, but you have to!” Mr. Lozano-Hammer told Scooter. “By pressing the button and leaving your voice behind, the piece gets its ‘crowd-sourced’ content.

Nearby, at Joshua Liner Gallery on 28th Street, Steve Powers (formerly of Deitch Projects) has a solo exhibition called “A Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures.” The graffiti and public art guru presents an assortment of paintings on aluminum that are bursting with vibrant colors.

“’A Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures’ combines word, image and color to create paintings that distill the complexities of love and life into simple ideograms that will amuse youths and amaze adults,” Mr. Powers explained to us. Read More

By Benjamin-Emile Le Hay 5/24/12 12:28pm

Scooter Pick of the Week

Image courtesy of American Museum of Natural History

Hazel Davies and American Museum of Natural History’s “The Exquisite Butterfly Companion” Box Set

It’s nearly summer! Flowers have bloomed and baby birds have hatched. But it’s also the time of year when many butterflies lay their eggs or caterpillars begin to hatch from winter.

Hazel Davies, Manager of Living Exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, has published a stunning tome, The Exquisite Butterfly Companion ($14.95) that focuses on all things Lepidoptera. The special box set includes a thorough field guide featuring scientific and informative details about nearly 100 species of butterfly and moth. For the artistic bug in your young learner, there is an envelope with 100 rich images of the each genus specified in the book. Read More

By Benjamin-Emile Le Hay 4/24/12 9:52pm

Gallery Girl

Artist Brad Fisher and Sophie

An 8-Year-Old’s Tour of New York’s Contemporary Art Scene


At age 3, Sophie Neale wrote “Baby’s First Blog” (“blob,” she called it then) for much-missed Cookie magazine. Her efforts caught the eye of Time’s James Poniewozik, who proposed she be signed to a book deal to write about growing up in public. While not yet ready to pen her memoirs, Sophie (now 8 years old) takes us on a tour of lower Manhattan art galleries as only a child can. Read More

By Jennifer Wright 5:20pm

Sites We Like

1118_full_bleed

An Enchanting Child-Themed Art Site – With French Roots – Grows In Brooklyn

Want to celebrate the magical realism of childhood in a more sophisticated fashion than your average Anne Geddes print? Of course you do – unless you really love grinning infants wearing pumpkin costumes. (I have always suspected those children are drugged). Kid-in’s take on childhood is thoroughly grown up.

If there is a child in a pumpkin costume on the site, you can be sure that it was intended as a wry and pointed commentary.

At Kid-in, an online platform on which a wide range of international and local designers and photographers focus their creative efforts on the subject of childhood, you’ll always find something fresh. Read More