Play & Art

[martacabral-art]

#storynotgadget | Artmaking, Materials, and Ownership | USQ Salon Series 2017

In July and August 2017 I was welcomed by the Digital Life team at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in Toowoomba, Australia.  Among other things, I was invited to be a guest speaker at their Salon Series - a monthly live-streamed lecture by a visiting scholar.

This is a very interesting series, as it takes the idea of (digital) life in a very broad sense and welcomes different perspectives on a variety of issues. The setting in itself is interesting as well: each lecture is recorded in a TV studio on campus, with both a live audience and direct remain online.

I was thrilled to have a diverse audience of people from different fields - from educational technology to business studies and librarianship - andthe interesting follow-up discussions made clear how we are all just in the business of figuring things out - one of the points that was key to my talk. As it turns out, #storynotgadget seems to be a very pertinent way of thinking about assessment in a business degree…

As with all USQ Salons, my guest lecture is available online on their website. Or watch it right here!

[martacabral-art]

Happy New Year!

As we welcome 2017, I think about the year that just ended.

It was a wonderfully busy one. Looking back, I recall so many art adventures I have yet to share with you.

2016 was a season of much traveling and consulting, with stretches of time in two hemispheres and four continents.

In the coming weeks I'll be sharing stories from some of my 2016 art adventures - from Brazilian painting studios to the red dirt of the Australian desert. Stay tuned!

[martacabral-art]

IMAG NING Toowoomba

IMAG NE, I read as I step out of the Toowoomba Central Library after a day of workshops. Seems fitting for the end of a day in which we played with materials and thought the world and ourselves with them, noticing what things are and imagining what they could be.

I was invited to Toowoomba to work with librarians and educators working with young children in the context of First Five Forever, a State Library of Queensland program to support “confidence around communication and learning” in the early years. In connection to activities like Story Time, we discussed artistic experiences, engaged in material explorations, and experienced how play, art, and learning can be one and the same when we take ownership of our own processes.

As we walked to dinner last night, my hosts talked me through Toowoomba basics: best coffee in town, the public library and how to get there, and street art. So after a successful day of workshops, with my coffee in hand, I explore the murals spread around the city, created during the latest edition of First Coat Mural Festival - described on their website as “a Queensland based creative initiative, driven by making arts & culture accessible through the transformation of public space.”

I wander around before the sun goes down, observing details in each mural and picturing scenes I was told about: artists painting the walls, passersby captivated by unexpected sites, kids mesmerized by the sight of an artwork coming to live in their neighborhood.

Some of the painted animals have so much color that we need to take a breath before we look again, so much texture that we wish to touch them, so much mystery that we are compelled to imagine stories for them - like we did last night, three grown-ups wondering about stone angels, friendly snakes, and strange-featured animals.

But then again we had just came from a day of creating stuff out of trash, constructing stories with random materials, imagining possibilities.

Over time, the murals in the city are painted over again and again, maybe building on each other and being inspired by what was there before. The people who lived with them, I hear, are inspired as well - inspired to observe and notice, and to experience what it feels like to have your city change right before your eyes - and own it.

[martacabral-art]

Exhibiting work - students’ work. Stuff or stories?

This is a debate I often have with my graduate students at Columbia University's Teachers College, when we talk about the art show I curate each year with works by infant, toddler, and preschool artists.

The show is an exhibition of the children’s artworks, their objects, the physical product of what we do together in the studio. I put much work into exhibiting them as things, part of a curated presentation with a coherence of its own. I hope to incorporate them within an exhibition that is of interest to other artists and art lovers, regardless of their interest for young children.

But I put even more care into doing that in a way that foregrounds the children's explorations, voices, and thoughts.

#storynotgadget is becoming one of my mottos. I argue that as fancy as our media, settings, or circumstances are, they are important not in themselves but to the extent that they help us give people (in this case 0-5 year old artists) more opportunities to make their voices heard and to share their ideas.

I talk about this over and over. The current exhibition is just the latest example. One of the tools I use here is Augmented Reality (AR). This is a way of connecting still images or objects that are in the gallery to other images (photos, videos, or text) that appear on a device such as a smartphone or an iPad when the original images or objects are scanned.

In The Very, Very Magic Suitcase and Other Art I used AR to link children’s photos to videos of them performing their artist statements (for older, more verbally articulate preschool children) and to candid videos of them at work (for younger children like infants and toddlers). I also linked each individual artwork to a photo, video, or statement of the artist at work, and this image shows up on the viewer’s device when the artwork is scanned.

AR is but a means to give each child the space to express and explain themselves, in words or otherwise; curating this exhibition leads me to do this in a way that reveals products as part of processes. We share our explorations by displaying objects in a "particular constellation of meanings" (Smith, 2012, p.30) that invite visitors and artists to make connections between artworks and experiences.

"The whole curatorial thing has to do not only with exhibitions, it has a lot to do with bringing people together. That is a large part of my work," says Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2011, p.34). I agree, and I feel like that's my work as well.

I curate experiences for my graduate students as much as I do for my young students in the studio. I choose readings and assignments carefully to invite connections, showcase the thinking of others, and provide students with opportunities to figure out things for themselves.

I recently started another curatorial exploration of my own using Twine to promote student stories, a sister to our Augmented Reality experiments. Twine is an online platform where anyone can easily create a “choose-your-own-adventure” with hardly any programming at all. It’s straightforward, easy, and free. Instead of asking my graduate students to write annotated bibliographies of their course readings on the artistic development of children, I asked them to each write a “chapter” in a choose-your-own-adventure game which began from a scenario that I provided, featuring a child in a museum. Following their own ideas of "what could happen next," each student wrote a step of this adventure that was also grounded in their course readings.

I learned about Twine via an innovative online book review which was itself a digital game.   It seemed like a perfect way to make standard course readings part of a living scenario, to turn exploration into an ongoing digital narrative and let students' ideas have real impact on where the story was going.

By the end of the semester, we had a product to show: an online game that we can play and share. We also had a process, and a serious list of classics in art education to chew on.

References:

Obrist, H.-U., & Lamm, A. E. (2011). Everything you always wanted to know about curating but were afraid to ask. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Smith, T. (2012). Thinking contemporary curating. New York, NY: Independent Curators International.

[martacabral-art]

Exhibiting work - students’ work. Stuff or stories?

This is a debate I often have with my graduate students at Columbia University's Teachers College, when we talk about the art show I curate each year with works by infant, toddler, and preschool artists.

The show is an exhibition of the children’s artworks, their objects, the physical product of what we do together in the studio. I put much work into exhibiting them as things, part of a curated presentation with a coherence of its own. I hope to incorporate them within an exhibition that is of interest to other artists and art lovers, regardless of their interest for young children.

But I put even more care into doing that in a way that foregrounds the children's explorations, voices, and thoughts.

#storynotgadget is becoming one of my mottos. I argue that as fancy as our media, settings, or circumstances are, they are important not in themselves but to the extent that they help us give people (in this case 0-5 year old artists) more opportunities to make their voices heard and to share their ideas.

I talk about this over and over. The current exhibition is just the latest example. One of the tools I use here is Augmented Reality (AR). This is a way of connecting still images or objects that are in the gallery to other images (photos, videos, or text) that appear on a device such as a smartphone or an iPad when the original images or objects are scanned.

In The Very, Very Magic Suitcase and Other Art I used AR to link children’s photos to videos of them performing their artist statements (for older, more verbally articulate preschool children) and to candid videos of them at work (for younger children like infants and toddlers). I also linked each individual artwork to a photo, video, or statement of the artist at work, and this image shows up on the viewer’s device when the artwork is scanned.

AR is but a means to give each child the space to express and explain themselves, in words or otherwise; curating this exhibition leads me to do this in a way that reveals products as part of processes. We share our explorations by displaying objects in a "particular constellation of meanings" (Smith, 2012, p.30) that invite visitors and artists to make connections between artworks and experiences.

"The whole curatorial thing has to do not only with exhibitions, it has a lot to do with bringing people together. That is a large part of my work," says Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2011, p.34). I agree, and I feel like that's my work as well.

I curate experiences for my graduate students as much as I do for my young students in the studio. I choose readings and assignments carefully to invite connections, showcase the thinking of others, and provide students with opportunities to figure out things for themselves.

I recently started another curatorial exploration of my own using Twine to promote student stories, a sister to our Augmented Reality experiments. Twine is an online platform where anyone can easily create a “choose-your-own-adventure” with hardly any programming at all. It’s straightforward, easy, and free. Instead of asking my graduate students to write annotated bibliographies of their course readings on the artistic development of children, I asked them to each write a “chapter” in a choose-your-own-adventure game which began from a scenario that I provided, featuring a child in a museum. Following their own ideas of "what could happen next," each student wrote a step of this adventure that was also grounded in their course readings.

I learned about Twine via an innovative online book review which was itself a digital game.   It seemed like a perfect way to make standard course readings part of a living scenario, to turn exploration into an ongoing digital narrative and let students' ideas have real impact on where the story was going.

By the end of the semester, we had a product to show: an online game that we can play and share. We also had a process, and a serious list of classics in art education to chew on.

References:

Obrist, H.-U., & Lamm, A. E. (2011). Everything you always wanted to know about curating but were afraid to ask. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Smith, T. (2012). Thinking contemporary curating. New York, NY: Independent Curators International.

[martacabral-art]

Exhibiting work - students’ work. Stuff or stories?

This is a debate I often have with my graduate students at Columbia University's Teachers College, when we talk about the art show I curate each year with works by infant, toddler, and preschool artists.

The show is an exhibition of the children’s artworks, their objects, the physical product of what we do together in the studio. I put much work into exhibiting them as things, part of a curated presentation with a coherence of its own. I hope to incorporate them within an exhibition that is of interest to other artists and art lovers, regardless of their interest for young children.

But I put even more care into doing that in a way that foregrounds the children's explorations, voices, and thoughts.

#storynotgadget is becoming one of my mottos. I argue that as fancy as our media, settings, or circumstances are, they are important not in themselves but to the extent that they help us give people (in this case 0-5 year old artists) more opportunities to make their voices heard and to share their ideas.

I talk about this over and over. The current exhibition is just the latest example. One of the tools I use here is Augmented Reality (AR). This is a way of connecting still images or objects that are in the gallery to other images (photos, videos, or text) that appear on a device such as a smartphone or an iPad when the original images or objects are scanned.

In The Very, Very Magic Suitcase and Other Art I used AR to link children’s photos to videos of them performing their artist statements (for older, more verbally articulate preschool children) and to candid videos of them at work (for younger children like infants and toddlers). I also linked each individual artwork to a photo, video, or statement of the artist at work, and this image shows up on the viewer’s device when the artwork is scanned.

AR is but a means to give each child the space to express and explain themselves, in words or otherwise; curating this exhibition leads me to do this in a way that reveals products as part of processes. We share our explorations by displaying objects in a "particular constellation of meanings" (Smith, 2012, p.30) that invite visitors and artists to make connections between artworks and experiences.

"The whole curatorial thing has to do not only with exhibitions, it has a lot to do with bringing people together. That is a large part of my work," says Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2011, p.34). I agree, and I feel like that's my work as well.

I curate experiences for my graduate students as much as I do for my young students in the studio. I choose readings and assignments carefully to invite connections, showcase the thinking of others, and provide students with opportunities to figure out things for themselves.

I recently started another curatorial exploration of my own using Twine to promote student stories, a sister to our Augmented Reality experiments. Twine is an online platform where anyone can easily create a “choose-your-own-adventure” with hardly any programming at all. It’s straightforward, easy, and free. Instead of asking my graduate students to write annotated bibliographies of their course readings on the artistic development of children, I asked them to each write a “chapter” in a choose-your-own-adventure game which began from ascenario that I provided, featuring a child in a museum. Following their own ideas of "what could happen next," each student wrote a step of this adventure that was also grounded in their course readings.

I learned about Twine via an innovative online book review which was itself a digital game.   It seemed like a perfect way to make standard course readings part of a living scenario, to turn exploration into an ongoing digital narrative and let students' ideas have real impact on where the story was going.

By the end of the semester, we had a product to show: an online game that we can play and share. We also had a process, and a serious list of classics in art education to chew on.

References:

Obrist, H.-U., & Lamm, A. E. (2011). Everything you always wanted to know about curating but were afraid to ask. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Smith, T. (2012). Thinking contemporary curating. New York, NY: Independent Curators International.

[martacabral-art]

Exhibiting work - students’ work. Stuff or stories?

This is a debate I often have with my graduate students at Columbia University's Teachers College, when we talk about the art show I curate each year with works by infant, toddler, and preschool artists.

The show is an exhibition of the children’s artworks, their objects, the physical product of what we do together in the studio. I put much work into exhibiting them as things, part of a curated presentation with a coherence of its own. I hope to incorporate them within an exhibition that is of interest to other artists and art lovers, regardless of their interest for young children.

But I put even more care into doing that in a way that foregrounds the children's explorations, voices, and thoughts.

#storynotgadget is becoming one of my mottos. I argue that as fancy as our media, settings, or circumstances are, they are important not in themselves but to the extent that they help us give people (in this case 0-5 year oldartists) more opportunities to make their voices heard and to share their ideas.

I talk about this over and over. The current exhibition is just the latest example. One of the tools I use here is Augmented Reality (AR). This is a way of connecting still images or objects that are in the gallery to other images (photos, videos, or text) that appear on a device such as a smartphone or an iPad when the original images or objects are scanned.

In The Very, Very Magic Suitcase and Other Art I used AR to link children’s photos to videos of them performing their artist statements (for older, more verbally articulate preschool children) and to candid videos of them at work (for younger children like infants and toddlers). I also linked each individual artwork to a photo, video, or statement of the artist at work, and this image shows up on the viewer’s device when the artwork is scanned.

AR is but a means to give each child the space to express and explain themselves, in words or otherwise; curating this exhibition leads me to do this in a way that reveals products as part of processes. We share our explorations by displaying objects in a "particular constellation of meanings" (Smith, 2012, p.30) that invite visitors and artists to make connections between artworks and experiences.

"The whole curatorial thing has to do not only with exhibitions, it has a lot to do with bringing people together. That is a large part of my work," says Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2011, p.34). I agree, and I feel like that's my work as well.

I curate experiences for my graduate students as much as I do for my young students in the studio. I choose readings and assignments carefully to invite connections, showcase the thinking of others, and provide students with opportunities to figure out things for themselves.

I recently started another curatorial exploration of my own using Twine to promote student stories, a sister to our Augmented Reality experiments. Twine is an online platform where anyone can easily create a “choose-your-own-adventure” with hardly any programming at all. It’s straightforward, easy, and free. Instead of asking my graduate students to write annotated bibliographies of their course readings on the artistic development of children, I asked them to each write a “chapter” in a choose-your-own-adventure game which began from ascenario that I provided, featuring a child in a museum. Following their own ideas of "what could happen next," each student wrote a step of this adventure that was also grounded in their course readings.

I learned about Twine via an innovative online book review which was itself a digital game.   It seemed like a perfect way to make standard course readings part of a living scenario, to turn exploration into an ongoing digital narrative and let students' ideas have real impact on where the story was going.

By the end of the semester, we had a product to show: an online game that we can play and share. We also had a process, and a serious list of classics in art education to chew on.

References:

Obrist, H.-U., & Lamm, A. E. (2011). Everything you always wanted to know about curating but were afraid to ask. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Smith, T. (2012). Thinking contemporary curating. New York, NY: Independent Curators International.

[martacabral-art]

Exhibiting work - students’ work. Stuff or stories?

This is a debate I often have with my graduate students at Columbia University's Teachers College, when we talk about the art show I curate each year with works by infant, toddler, and preschool artists.

The show is an exhibition of the children’s artworks, their objects, the physical product of what we do together in the studio. I put much work into exhibiting them as things, part of a curated presentation with a coherence of its own. I hope to incorporate them within an exhibition that is of interest to other artists and art lovers, regardless of their interest for young children.

But I put even more care into doing that in a way that foregrounds the children's explorations, voices, and thoughts.

#storynotgadget is becoming one of my mottos. I argue that as fancy as our media, settings, or circumstances are, they are important not in themselves but to the extent that they help us give people (in this case 0-5 year oldartists) more opportunities to make their voices heard and to share their ideas.

I talk about this over and over. The current exhibition is just the latest example. One of the tools I use here is Augmented Reality (AR). This is a way of connecting still images or objects that are in the gallery to other images (photos, videos, or text) that appear on a device such as a smartphone or an iPad when the original images or objects are scanned.

In The Very, Very Magic Suitcase and Other Art I used AR to link children’s photos to videos of them performing their artist statements (for older, more verbally articulate preschool children) and to candid videos of them at work (for younger children like infants and toddlers). I also linked each individual artwork to a photo, video, or statement of the artist at work, and this image shows up on the viewer’s device when the artwork is scanned.

AR is but a means to give each child the space to express and explain themselves, in words or otherwise; curating this exhibition leads me to do this in a way that reveals products as part of processes. We share our explorations by displaying objects in a "particular constellation of meanings" (Smith, 2012, p.30) that invite visitors and artists to make connections between artworks and experiences.

"The whole curatorial thing has to do not only with exhibitions, it has a lot to do with bringing people together. That is a large part of my work," says Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2011, p.34). I agree, and I feel like that's my work as well.

I curate experiences for my graduate students as much as I do for my young students in the studio. I choose readings and assignments carefully to invite connections, showcase the thinking of others, and provide students with opportunities to figure out things for themselves.

I recently started another curatorial exploration of my own using Twine to promote student stories, a sister to our Augmented Reality experiments. Twine is an online platform where anyone can easily create a “choose-your-own-adventure” with hardly any programming at all. It’s straightforward, easy, and free. Instead of asking my graduate students to write annotated bibliographies of their course readings on the artistic development of children, I asked them to each write a “chapter” in a choose-your-own-adventure game which began from ascenario that I provided, featuring a child in a museum. Following their own ideas of "what could happen next," each student wrote a step of this adventure that was also grounded in their course readings.

I learned about Twine via an innovative online book review which was itself a digital game. http://theliftedbrow.com/post/124866909642/a-tear-in-flatland-nick  It seemed like a perfect way to make standard course readings part of a living scenario, to turn exploration into an ongoing digital narrative and let students' ideas have real impact on where the story was going.

By the end of the semester, we had a product to show: an online game that we can play and share. We also had a process, and a serious list of classics in art education to chew on.

References:

Obrist, H.-U., & Lamm, A. E. (2011). Everything you always wanted to know about curating but were afraid to ask. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Smith, T. (2012). Thinking contemporary curating. New York, NY: Independent Curators International.

[martacabral-art]

Exhibiting work - students’ work. Stuff or stories?

This is a debate I often have with my graduate students at Columbia University's Teachers College, when we talk about the art show I curate each year with works by infant, toddler, and preschool artists.

The show is an exhibition of the children’s artworks, their objects, the physical product of what we do together in the studio. I put much work into exhibiting them as things, part of a curated presentation with a coherence of its own. I hope to incorporate them within an exhibition that is of interest to other artists and art lovers, regardless of their interest for young children.

But I put even more care into doing that in a way that foregrounds the children's explorations, voices, and thoughts.

#storynotgadget is becoming one of my mottos. I argue that as fancy as our media, settings, or circumstances are, they are important not in themselves but to the extent that they help us give people (in this case 0-5 year oldartists) more opportunities to make their voices heard and to share their ideas.

I talk about this over and over. The current exhibition is just the latest example. One of the tools I use here is Augmented Reality (AR). This is a way of connecting still images or objects that are in the gallery to other images (photos, videos, or text) that appear on a device such as a smartphone or an iPad when the original images or objects are scanned.

In The Very, Very Magic Suitcase and Other Art I used AR to link children’s photos to videos of them performing their artist statements (for older, more verbally articulate preschool children) and to candid videos of them at work (for younger children like infants and toddlers). I also linked each individual artwork to a photo, video, or statement of the artist at work, and this image shows up on the viewer’s device when the artwork is scanned.

AR is but a means to give each child the space to express and explain themselves, in words or otherwise; curating this exhibition leads me to do this in a way that reveals products as part of processes. We share our explorations by displaying objects in a "particular constellation of meanings" (Smith, 2012, p.30) that invite visitors and artists to make connections between artworks and experiences.

"The whole curatorial thing has to do not only with exhibitions, it has a lot to do with bringing people together. That is a large part of my work," says Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2011, p.34). I agree, and I feel like that's my work as well.

I curate experiences for my graduate students as much as I do for my young students in the studio. I choose readings and assignments carefully to invite connections, showcase the thinking of others, and provide students with opportunities to figure out things for themselves.

I recently started another curatorial exploration of my own using Twine to promote student stories, a sister to our Augmented Reality experiments. Twine is an online platform where anyone can easily create a “choose-your-own-adventure” with hardly any programming at all. It’s straightforward, easy, and free. Instead of asking my graduate students to write annotated bibliographies of their course readings on the artistic development of children, I asked them to each write a “chapter” in a choose-your-own-adventure game which began from ascenario that I provided, featuring a child in a museum. Following their own ideas of "what could happen next," each student wrote a step of this adventure that was also grounded in their course readings.

I learned about Twine via an innovative online book review which was itself a digital game. http://theliftedbrow.com/post/124866909642/a-tear-in-flatland-nick  It seemed like a perfect way to make standard course readings part of a living scenario, to turn exploration into an ongoing digital narrative and let students' ideas have real impact on where the story was going.

By the end of the semester, we had a product to show: an online game that we can play and share. We also had a process, and a serious list of classics in art education to chew.

References:

Obrist, H.-U., & Lamm, A. E. (2011). Everything you always wanted to know about curating but were afraid to ask. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Smith, T. (2012). Thinking contemporary curating. New York, NY: Independent Curators International.

[martacabral-art]

The Very, Very Magic Suitcase & Other Art

It's magic, it's art, it's a suitcase.

There's paint and glass, there's clay, glue, wire, and other materials - artworks by infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Come visit!

The Very, Very Magic Suitcase & Other Art, an exhibition with artworks by the Rita Gold Early Childhood Center children will be displayed at the Macy Gallery (Columbia University campus at 525 W120th St, New York, NY) Feb 15th through March 2nd. Guided tours are available!

I'll soon tell you more about the title, the works, the processes. But for now, here's an invitation. Come visit! #verymagicsuitcase

[martacabral-art]

MATERIAL INQUIRY? It's a thing.

Curious? Sean Justice and I have been thinking about it and would love to chat with you more.

As research partners, Sean and I have been working together for a few years now, teaching, writing, researching, presenting. We think of Material Inquiry as a learning methodology that explores the way tools and materials spark curiosity, wonder, and a need to know. We’re passionate about it, and here’s where we’re collecting some of our thoughts: http://materialinquiry.com

Martin Luther King day marks the beginning of a new semester for me - and a promising one.

The Rita Gold Early Childhood Center exhibition is right around the corner, there’s NAEA in March, writing to be done, courses to be taught in different places… much to think about in the studio and over the course of long runs.

There’s a few projects in the works and surely many more that I can’t yet foresee - but you know I’ll keep you posted.

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"Art makes us happy. Young children explore materials and ideas."

Happy 2016!

I'm thrilled to say that my latest book, "Art makes us happy. Young children explore materials and ideas" is now ready and available.

This book is based on the art exhibition I curated last Spring featuring my young students' artwork. It includes essays about digital materials as curatorial tools, the process of curating an art exhibition of young children's work, and children's artistic statements, photos, plus much more.

A big thank you to Sean, Hannah, Matt, and all Rita Gold Center teachers and staff for all their help! The book is available here. Thoughts and feedback are most welcome. Thank you!

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It's that candy cane bagel time of the year #running (at Prospect Park)

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No, he's not me. But I'll be taking over his chair in a min to talk about #augmentedreality and other #digitalmaterials as curatorial tools (even if I speak standing up). (at London, United Kingdom)

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Ripping up the curriculum: Toddler-led graffiti practice

It wasn’t me; they started it. (I was always told to take responsibility for my actions, but they did, they started it.) Toddlers - they started it. They showed interest in stuff hanging in mid-air, and they liked to work with paint.

The hanging stuff was wobbly, so we used spray bottles.  It was hard to paint like that, so we hung the fabric and cardboard against vertical surfaces - and then pulled them off.  The toddlers kept spraying, painting, and ripping it all up like piñatas. I found safe paints and a way to make a transportable graffiti wall that could be used anywhere. It was up to the toddlers - after all, they started it.

They did start it - and I responded the best I could. This response happened in a growing dialogue with my friends and colleagues Emmy Fincham and Tran Templeton and eventually led to a panel presentation at the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood 2015 conference: Graffiti as metaphor for curriculum: Entering the nomadic space of the vandal-artist in a toddler classroom.

Where else but at a conference like RECE would we find the perfect venue for a paper on working with toddlers through the lens of graffiti?

Conference participants played with materials like the toddlers did, vaporizing conference room walls with watercolors, making marks with craypas, exploring fabrics hanging and dangling from above, ripping paper and fabric.

What we presented were not definitive answers or neat findings, but questions and ideas we've been grappling with, stemming from our work with the group of toddlers we share our days with. We continue to question our ideas, working to bring them to a publication that honors that nomadic space of thought.

This was my first RECE conference and Halloweeney Dublin was the perfect place for it - but I'm looking forward to a sunnier one in New Zealand next.

[martacabral-art]

11th Grocer or Corner store Doctor