“Just a pair of hands and a whole lot of clever imagination” perfectly describes this 1933 film from British Pathe. The performer moves his hands slowly so that the audience can see how the shape is formed. The setup is minimal: a darkened room, a bare patch of wall, a light source to cast shadows.…
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Since the convergence of Covid-19 and the run-up to the election, I’ve been increasingly bombarded with homemade mini zeitgeist-videos expressing the pent-up emotions we’re all sharing during this rocky time. The best of these I forward to good friends; mostly, I enjoy a good chuckle, then hit delete. I’ve kept this one on my desktop,…
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In a 2012 talk at AIGA, Zach Lieberman, cofounder of the School for Poetic Computation, read the short, powerful ‘I Am Art’ out loud. It is one of the most astonishing and rhapsodic proclamations of art-making we’ve seen and totally nails the exhilaration art brings.
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Designer/imagineer Dominic Wilcox applies a unique philosophy to encourage kid’s to invent things. Grownups can use it to spark their creativity.
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Artist Spencer Finch transformed a hospital’s visitor’s waiting room by creating a feeling of being in a snow globe. He used what seems like a simple, do-able approach…
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The inspired pairing of Yayoi Kusama’s drawings with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale has resulted in a unique experience. The text and brilliantly patterned images infiltrate the senses in unexpected ways.
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(Video link here.) Friday is the day we usually publish a recipe, hoping that it will prove a delicious weekend activity for our readers. While we recommend your checking out the menu and recipe links for the birthday dinner we’ll be cooking for a friend (at bottom), we can think of no better Spring activity than making…
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At A Cup of Jo, we spotted a terrific idea Stylist Meta Coleman employed in her son Henrick’s room at home in Provo, Utah: a black and white wall mural made from a C1900 photo. Here’s how and where she had it made:
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Whenever someone we know has a baby, we go on the hunt for our favorite kid’s book, the enduringly great, zennish, out-of-print, A Hole Is to Dig by Ruth Krauss with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. We buy used copies, doing our best to find clean ones, but we never really know what we’ll get. Recently, we found…
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Several months ago, two Little Free Libraries appeared in the park across the way. Since then, we’ve found a number of children’s books with big messages about the creative process. In Art for Children: Paul Klee, Ernst Raboff’s description of Klee’s painting of a treehouse opened our eyes to the many elements of the painting…
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(Video link here.) Some brilliant soul at the New York Times had the inspired idea to see what second graders would make of a meal at Daniel, one of New York City’s fanciest, seriously haute-cuisine, restaurants. Six kids from P.S. 295 in Brooklyn were treated to a seven-course, $220 Tasting Menu. Their reactions are captured in this…
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Susan Dworski’s post about her granddaughter’s lanyard reminded us of our own lanyard-making pleasures in summers long ago. Somehow we’d learned a number of patterns from braids to boxes and make all sorts of useful things out of them. But what we remember especially, is the dreamy hours spent making them. That, of course, got…
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Fredericks & Mae’s beautiful Floralia – Fighter kite is meant to hang a wall to IMAGINE flying in air. But for us, it is inspiration for diy kites you can fly, like the one we saw the other day being flown from a Harlem rooftop. Made by Joel has a great tutorial, one of many kite plans we found online.
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One of our favorite books as kids remains A Hole Is to Dig, A Dictionary of First Definitions, a brilliant wise collaboration by the great Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak. We only recently discovered Open House for Butterflies originally published in 1960. It is indeed a treasure full of charmingly philosophical, zen-ish, in-the-moment wisdom, perfect for kids…
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Lately, we’ve been seeing some swell cut-out walls in kid’s rooms. The clever cut-outs act as doorways and objects of play. The also define the room as being a place for invention and outside-the-box thinking.
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(Video link here.) Under the guidance of innovative education organization MindDrive, thirty at-risk students in a Kansas City, Missouri neighborhood once called the “killing zip code” , built an electric car that successfully converted social media into fuel for a road trip from Kansas City to Washington D.C. A tweet was 5 watts; a Facebook like, 1 watt;…
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The Whitney Museum recently sponsored a public art project with artist Gary Simmons. To make the project, teens collected responses to the question, “What are you waiting for?” from their classmates and the larger community. The handwritten scraps of paper were then photographed, printed, and wheatpasted onto a wall, creating a layered, complex, and sometimes…
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San Francisco Bubbleman 1 by Susan Dworski @improvisedlife.com from Sally Schneider on Vimeo. (Video link here.) Some time ago, Susan Dworski emailed us about the mysterious Bubbleman she passes on Highway 101, and sent two little videos. At sunset today alongside bustling Highway 101 in Tiburon, CA, an unknown man with a boom box coaxes soap…
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One of our secret passions is connectors — not just connectors of ideas – but connectors of physical things as well: materials you can build with. We can’t wait to try out Stick-lets, flexible, stretchy silicone connectors made in a variety of configuerations. (They’re meant for kids, but when did that ever stop us?) You…
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We are amazed at how often we return to The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster’s classic kid’s book that is celebrating 50 years of stunning popularity. It’s the story of Milo, a bored ten-year-old who comes home to find a large toy tollbooth sitting in his room. In his rarely-used kid’s-size car, he embarks on a surprising…
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