EXHIBITIONS

Member Previews: Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Early Viewing Hours - Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Members enjoy special early viewing hours of Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 before the Museum opens to the public.

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Pop-Up Play @ MoMA

Come to MoMA and play! Explore, build, and create with everyday and recycled materials to create a pop-up play space. Drop-in before or after visiting MoMA's Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 exhibition, where you can learn about innovative play methods and spaces of the past. Educators will be on hand to facilitate child-directed play, but parents must accompany their children. Organized in collaboration with Pop-Up Adventure Play.

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Growing by Design: Designing for Kids

Visit Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 to discover toys, games, playgrounds, and other things that were designed just for kids. Then get creative as you mock up your own kid-friendly design.

Back to School: A Taste of Finland

In addition to inspiring modern design, from toys and books to playgrounds and schools, children are themselves subject to design, in large part through food and nutrition. A number of works on view in the exhibition Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000 represent the complexity of this relationship throughout the 20th century, from Paul Schuitema’s 1927–28 advertisement for Nutricia to Jukka Veistola’s 1969 competition-winning poster for UNICEF.

The most regulated aspect of many children’s everyday relationship with food is school lunch, and this is exactly the subject of Back to School: A Taste of Finland. In this series, a collaboration between the exhibition curators, MoMA’s Cafe 2, and the Consulate General of Finland, adults are invited to participate in a meal inspired by the koululounas (school lunches) of Finland, a country consistently recognized for excelling in all aspects of public education. According to its National Board of Education, Finland was the first country in the world to serve free, regulated school meals to children on a large scale, starting in 1948. Today, balanced meals of local and inexpensive ingredients provide both energy and educational value.

Back to School: A Taste of Finland lunches will be attended by curator Juliet Kinchin and curatorial assistant Aidan O’Connor, of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, with a menu organized by Petteri Luoto, one of Finland’s most celebrated chefs. Luoto has been associated with gourmet restaurants in Helsinki, Turku, and Göteborg, and represented Finland at the Shanghai EXPO 2010. He is currently creating a food concept for the upcoming Finnish Radical Design Week in Shanghai. Luoto will collaborate with chef Lynn Bound of Cafe 2 and Terrace 5 at MoMA.

Variations on a Theme Park

Since Walt Disney opened the quintessential utopia of leisure in 1955 in Anaheim, California, Disneyland and its empire—actual amusement parks such as Disney World, Euro-Disney, and Tokyo Disney, as well as its atomized offspring in the form of The Mickey Mouse Club, brands like Hannah Montana, and Disney Films—have transformed notions of childhood, spaces of leisure, and concepts of the public, urban space. This discussion will explore the design innovations that produced spaces like the Magic Kingdom, the utopian aspirations behind EPCOT, and the urban planning concepts driving Main Street and New Orleans Square, which together produce an environment of innocence, exploration, and adventure for children and adults alike.

Jennifer Gray (PhD, Columbia University) is a historian of modern art and architecture, specializing in the relationships between progressive social politics and the built environment. She teaches and lectures at The Museum of Modern Art.

Blocks Tell a Story: Creating Narratives in Space and Time

Led by toy designer and educator Karen Hewitt of Burlington, Vermont–based Learning Materials Workshop, these two workshops and drop-in activities invite visitors to channel their inner sense of creative play to design their own stories and reinvent their urban landscapes with building blocks.

Workshops begin with a brief visual tour of the history of building blocks as a learning tool from the 1850s to the present—from Friedrich Froebel to computer Smart Blocks. Participants then create narratives using only blocks. Without the aid of figurative miniature objects, the blocks can become symbols for objects, people, and animals. Participants’ narratives will be documented and shared.

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Century of the Child, Part I: 1900–1945

Century of the Child, Part 2: 1945–2000

Can Food Be Art?

Artist Nancy Hwang has been engaged in making communication-based participatory art projects, and she proposes that food—cooking with strangers and sharing their recipes—can be a good way to get to know one another on an intimate level. Following a brief introduction to previous works by Hwang, audience members are invited to share their childhood food memories to open up a conversation. This participatory talk is open-ended, much like Nancy’s own performance work.

Nancy Hwang has been producing audience-participatory projects in galleries, museums and public spaces over the last fifteen years in North America, Europe and Asia. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland.

Midori Yamamura, Ph.D., is Visiting Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute and a Lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art. She is the author of Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years (2009) and a contributor to the Whitney Museum exhibition catalog, Yoyoi Kusama (2012).

Duck Duck Goose

In museum education, educators are often taught to pose open-ended questions, allowing for answers that further conversation and understanding. For this project, a selection of works is chosen from MoMA’s collection. Audience members are invited to share their views on each work, but they must observe the rules of the game. Though this project diverges from the format of the children’s game duck, duck, goose, it retains the game’s playful nature and uses the form of childhood games to further an exploration as to what transpires when we talk about art together.

Paula Stuttman (MFA, New York University) is an artist and part-time assistant professor of postwar and contemporary art at the New School of Public Engagement in New York City. She is a lecturer and a Community/Access Educator at MoMA, and is an educator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Jewish Museum.

The Child in the City of Play

In conjunction with the exhibition Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000, this half-day symposium explores the impact of play in urban environments on childhood development. Sessions feature play theorists, architects and designers, educators, and others as they discuss topics including the importance of childhood play and the design of playful cities. Participants include Jane Chermayeff, President, Architecture Playground Equipment; Amy L. Freitag, executive director, New York Restoration Project; Adriaan Geuze, Founder/Principal, West 8; Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Professor, Department of Psychology, Temple University; Darell Hammond, Founder, KaBOOM; Juliet Kinchin, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA, and organizer of the exhibition; Neil Stevenson, IDEO; Doug Suisman, Principal, Suisman Urban Design, Santa Monica; and the Tottenville High School Marching Band.

This program will be live-streamed at livestream.com/museummodernart.

12:30–1:00 p.m. | Theater doors open
Slideshow of images from Playscapes blog, Paige L. Johnson

Welcome, Juliet Kinchin

Introduction, Jane Clark Chermayeff

Why Play?
"Knights and Dragons, Blocks and Shape Sorters: Where Play Meets the Science of Learning," Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

Bridging from the 20th into the 21st Century
"Making Space and Place for Play in the Century of the Child," Juliet Kinchin

"Inside Out Play," Neil Stevenson

Designing Playful Cities
Introduction, Jane Clark Chermayeff

"Aren’t We All Children?," Adriaan Geuze

"A Great Place to Play for Every Child?," Darell Hammond

3:15–3:45 p.m. | Break
Play in MoMA Studio: Common Senses, featuring interactive installations by artists Fritz Haeg and J. Morgan Puett of Mildred's Lane and the Mildred Complex(ity); designer Karen Hewitt; and educators Reggio Children.

Designing Playful Cities (cont.)
Introduction, Jane Clark Chermayeff

"The Walking City as a Child’s Muse," Doug Suisman

"Dominoes, Dirt, and Diplomacy: Expanding Play in the Public Realm," Amy Freitag

Intersections: Design, Play, and City Surroundings
"A Playful Conversation," Neil Stevenson, Darell Hammond, Doug Suisman, and Amy Freitag; moderated by Jane Clark Chermayeff

Closing Remarks, Juliet Kinchin

Procession, Tottenville High School Marching Band

5:15–6:15 p.m. | Reception

Are Games Art?

In this conversational presentation, we'll explore games as an art form. From looking at games in MoMA's collection to discussing how some artists use games as a medium for making their work, this talk looks at games and play through the lense of visual art. After inviting participants to share their ideas about the relationships between art and games, the program will end with a conversation about art projects that tow the lines between games, art, and social engagement.

Sheetal Prajapati is Associate Educator, Public Programs in the Department of Education at MoMA.

Radical Pedagogy: Wholeschooling, with Paul Bartow and J. Morgan Puett in conversation

Artist Paul Bartow talks with J. Morgan Puett of Mildred’s Lane and the Mildred Complex(ity). Puett joins us from Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, to discuss her "adventure," Radical Pedagogy: Wholeschooling.

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Swarming and Self-Organization, with Brian Conley

Brian Conley is an artist living in San Francisco, where he is a professor at the California College of the Arts. He is cofounder, with Sina Najafi, of Cabinet Magazine and education and curatorial advisor for SADA for Contemporary Iraqi Art, a remote-teaching program based in Baghdad and Beirut that serves young Iraqi artists. His most recent exhibition, at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, was a performance in collaboration with historical-war-gamers, titled Miniature War in Iraq…and now Afghanistan.

High Design, to Scale

Explore what is at stake when children have made-to-size versions of adult objects, and how this early exposure to a particular aesthetic sensibility may affect a child’s developing taste. For example, how does the child-sized Breuer Chair differ from a chair originally designed with a child in mind? Join us for an interactive discussion that addresses the strategies behind both modes of design.

Molleen Theodore (PhD, CUNY Graduate Center) is the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Fellow in the Education Department at the Yale University Art Gallery and a lecturer in the Department of Education at MoMA. In 2010, she completed her dissertation, “Beyond ‘Meaningless Work’: The Art of Walter De Maria, 1960–1977.” Her focus is on postwar art from the Americas and Europe.