Pants, Puppets, Books

This month, I am the artist-in-residency at Kohl’s Children’s Museum. This is a fancy pants way of saying that I am spending several mornings this May with the young artists who make it past the big tank of turtles to come into the art studio. Inside, they find a bounty of materials. Inside themselves, hopefully, they find imagination.

Preschoolers come in the early hours, elementary age field trippers in the later hours. With both, I make two kinds of folded books. With “pants” books, they make four folds, neat or not, and cut along a crease line with scissors, neat or not. When the artists recognize that they have indeed cut a piece of cardstock to look like trousers, the silence breaks with gasps and giggles. Pairs of paper pants walk and dance, brief puppets before they fold into a book.

This is where the artists leave me, moving with their new books to the next station to press designs into styrofoam shapes, and shapes into ink pads and their books. When they first lift the inked stamp from their pants book, sparks fly. “Oh!” and “Wow!” and “I’m going to make…!” Ideas flash from brain to hand to pants.

Then things slow way down. The focus feels rare. Into the book pages: forests of green triangles. Flowers and suns, butterflies and owls. In colored pencil, the book artists add eyes and wings and legs. They become authors, writing in their names, and captions, and “art so cool.” Some whisper oral stories to transcribing adults.

Child magic is not illusion. It blooms in art, in layers, tucks into folds, in “can I make another one?”

On Friday, we moved on from “pants” to accordion books. In two hours, all ninety of the recycled covers I’d cut were gone, glued to books filled with finger and hand prints.

But my first book artist of the day came at a quiet moment. She opened her new accordion book with its waffle box covers next to mine. I pushed my index finger into the purple ink pad in front of me, then pressed my print onto the open page of my own book. Quietly, she did the same in hers. She looked at me and giggled. Magic starts in the eyes.

So I gave my finger print eyes, then a flowing skirt and tentacles so long they wiggled off the page—a papery life as a jellyfish. She picked up a pencil and gave her print eyes, then four legs and hair. Each press into the ink pad: another giggle. Each new animal—often new species I’ve never seen before—a new delight.

Her mom watched from across the room, maybe willing the magic to memory, to last as long as it can. Or maybe that’s me.

—SLC

• 

• 

•