Children’s Exhibitions at the Walker
By Jill Vuchetich
The exhibition Show & Tell: An Exhibition for Kids opening November, 2025 at the Walker is a child-friendly contemporary art show featuring works from the permanent collection. But is there such a thing as child-friendly contemporary art? It may come as a surprise that the Walker Art Center would do a family-friendly art exhibition. In fact, since the opening of the Walker in 1940 the focus has been on art for everyone, including the youngest museum visitors.
Early shows like Time Off (1940), Children’s Portraits (1941), and Terry and the Pirates (1941) included works by and for children with themes on play, friends, and adventure. Terry and the Pirates was an exhibition of a popular comic strip starring a boy, Terry Lee, exploring the world, making friends, and defeating villains, while Time Off was a family-friendly graphic presentation on the importance of leisure and play, and Children’s Portraits was a promotional show for world peace.
These early shows reflect the moment in which they were made, at the end of the Great Depression and on the verge of the United States entering World War II. After the war, the Walker continued to promote world peace in shows like Paintings by Children of Uzbekistan (1945) and Art for World Friendship (1957). But it also turned to innovation and imagination, particularly during the 1948 Children’s Fair, which occupied the entire Art Center with paintings, sculpture, and art-making.
Among the projects were Making Pictures, an instructional book by Walker educator Carol Kottke, and an early building toy called Magnet Master designed by Walker’s Director Daniel Defenbacher and designer, Arthur Carrara.
Both projects encouraged children to use their imaginations and create without instructions or plans. For example, Making Pictures, Kottke’s innovative book, is described as “teaching without teaching” and emphasized that children see things differently than adults. The text continues:
“There are no drawings of cows or houses or fire engines to copy or fill in. The child is encouraged to make his own kind of “pictures” with colors, textures, paint, paper, string, cloth, paste, crayon and, in fact, wastebasket stuff. A child may put together a fantastic assortment of these materials with a purely abstract result. He may call it a “cow” or “feeling cross.” It doesn’t matter. He made his own picture.”
(Quoted in Everyday Art Quarterly, issue #8, 1948, Walker Art Center)
In addition to spending time in the makers’ spaces, families could view works from artists such as abstract painters Adolph Gottlieb and Edmund Lewandowski, as well as figurative paintings by John Sloan. A gallery with artworks by children from around the world was hung at their height for better viewing. Colorful walls, toys, furniture, balloons, and movies completed the fair.
In the 1960s and 1970s, imaginative exhibitions continued with artist-focused projects such as Imagadventure (1965), featuring art environments by Enrico Baj that resemble giant erector sets, a Jean Tinguely radio sculpture, and puppetry by Marta Minujín; and the educational design show New Learning Spaces and Places in 1974.
The New Learning Spaces and Places show, like the earlier 1948 Children’s Fair, occupied multiple galleries aimed at attracting kids. Designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, a leading architecture firm, it included artist environments such as Frank Gillette’s Track/Trace, a tower of 15 video monitors with cameras that projected viewers in the video tower. While children were delighted to see themselves reflected in the monitors, the point of including the work was to highlight how technology could be used in the classroom.
Technology, tools, and toys featured heavily as potential learning aids. In addition to Gillette’s work were educational videos by designers Charles and Ray Eames and a hologram created by artist Siah Armajani. One fascinating installation was the robotic TURTLE developed at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Described as a “cybernetic toy capable of moving forward and backward and rotating about its central axis at the command of the operator . . .” (quoted in NLSP catalogue, 1974).
Resembling a turtle’s hard shell, it was designed to teach children about geometry, allowing the child to create movements and angles while drawing on paper, like a robotic Etch A Sketch. These learning tools and toys occupied equally interesting gallery spaces, configured into alternative classrooms using low-cost building materials such as steel grain bins and sewer culverts.
Since the 1980s, the museum’s focus changed from in-gallery experiences for kids to special maker spaces and direct interaction with artists through residencies and workshops, such as the 1984 Keith Haring residency, where kids designed a stage set under Haring’s guidance.
Similarly, with the establishment of a Teen Program in the early 1990s, the museum turned toward engaging teens with artists in residence. Many of the teen workshops with artists coincided with exhibitions, such as Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975–1995.
One notable residency culminating in an exhibition was Coloring: New Work by Glenn Ligon in 2000. Ligon held workshops with kids using pages from historical African American coloring books from the 1960s and ’70s depicting important figures, including Harriet Tubman, Isaac Hayes, and Malcolm X, which later inspired a series of paintings by the artist. For the exhibition, Ligon’s paintings and 48 drawings by children ages 3–6 were on display.
In an interview with the Walker curators, Ligon said:
“We all know that kids’ drawings are great. But why are they great? Part of it has to do with the delight they experience making something, a delight that shows in the work. I also love children’s drawings because kids’ relationship to culture, language, and identity is not yet fixed. They haven’t yet ingested all the rules and prohibitions adults have, so there is no one way that things have to be in their drawings.”
(Glenn Ligon quoted from an interview with curators, Joan Rothfuss and Olukemi Ilesanmi, for the Coloring: New Work by Glenn Ligon exhibition catalogue, 2000.)
Though not a children’s exhibition, Coloring was a family-friendly show that placed the children’s drawings at a lower height for kids to view, like the much earlier 1948 Children’s Fair.
Now, with Show & Tell, the exhibition experience for kids is back in the galleries, freeing them to explore art at various active stations, including reading, making, watching, and playing.▪︎
