Esther: My name is Esther Adler. I'm a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and I'm here with my daughter, Lily.
Lily: My name is Lily. I'm nine years old, and this painting is by Joseph Stella.
Esther: And it's called First Light.
Lily: Because maybe it's the sunrise, and the sunrise is the first light of the day. There's like greens, grays, blues, and whites, and yellows. You have a big rectangle where the wall is and then over the wall I see bushes that are little semicircles. And then over where the mountains are, it's blue and super bumpy. And of course the big tree. I thought it looked funny, like uncentered broccoli. But if you remove the wall there would be so much more to the painting.
Esther: Why do you think the artist put the wall there?
Lily: I feel like maybe because he felt like trying to save the environment.
Esther: That’s possible. When he was making this painting, there were a lot of changes happening in the country. It’s a time when there’s a lot of cities being built, a lot of industry, and artists are interested in pausing and looking out at nature.
Although for me, it's annoying that there's this wall in the way. And who builds walls? People, right?
Lily: Yeah. It blocks off nature from other stuff. But I think he likes nature because there’s no human interaction in this besides the wall. If you look at the sunrise, it happens naturally, right? Do humans do anything to that?
Esther: No. It just always happens no matter what we do.
Lily: We can't stop these things from happening, because that's nature. That's just how it happens.