Kids As Curators - 2011

In its seventh year, Kids as Curators teamed up with Klein Elementary School in Harborcreek, the Robert Benjamin Wiley Charter School, and students from Corry Junior High School.  The three groups of students represented diverse backgrounds—urban, suburban, and rural—and created exhibits that turned out to be engaging, humorous, and interactive.

Klein Elementary School students created their own “time capsules,” inspired by famous pop artist Andy Warhol.  Warhol created boxed “time capsules,” over the course of his career, by placing certain artifacts of a particular day into a cardboard box, sealing the box, and returning at a later date, sometimes to use the contents for artistic inspiration.  Students filled their boxes with a variety of items, catalogued the contents, and chose how to arrange the boxes in the museum.

Students from the Robert Benjamin Wiley Charter School built an exhibit around color collections.  Each student chose a color and selected objects of different shades of that color to fill their own personalized colored boxes.  Students also created mobiles, based on color schemes, made up of pictures from around their homes and schools juxtaposed with pictures from magazines.

Corry Junior High students, inspired by photographer and artist Slinkachu, created their own miniature figures, which were installed and photographed in school, home, and community settings.  Students considered their interaction with material culture and presented collections of graphic art icons such as coke cans, baseball cards, flip phones, and texting anagrams.

• “I loved it!  I liked seeing the different thoughts of different people.”
  
  
• “There was a lot of thought put into it and there is a lot of variety.”
  
  
• “My automatic reaction was ‘wow…my project is sitting in the Erie Art Museum.’  I felt proud of myself and was almost in awe, and thought about all the hard work that went into the project.”
  
  
• “I was like OMG.”
  
  
• “I thought it was inspirational to see such a vast collection of everyday items.  Well organized.”