Exhibition Archive

May 23, 2007 - June 17, 2007

Younger Artists: Visual Stories

For the eighth year, this annual Learning Center exhibition provides students with the opportunity to showcase their work in a museum setting. Individuals, groups, and entire classes create original art inspired by their visits to the KMA. On view will be handmade books and puppets on the subjects of trains, mythological monsters, heroes and heroines, and tools.

April 22, 2007 - May 6, 2007

Young Artists 2007

Every spring, art teachers from the Museum’s member schools select the best work of high school seniors for display at the KMA. The students design their own invitation, participate in the show’s installation, and host the opening reception. Some have even returned years later to exhibit at the Museum as professional artists.

January 14, 2007 - April 8, 2007

Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection

Tools have empowered human beings since the early Stone Age. The Hechinger Collection celebrates the mundane tool – the hammer, the saw, the rake, the paintbrush – as a point of departure for the creation of artworks that are at once beautiful, surprising, and sometimes humorous. The exhibition suggests new ways to look at these utilitarian objects, highlighting the artist’s act of creation and emphasizing the simple point that artists utilize tools – sometimes fashioned by themselves – to produce artworks. The collection offers a broad range of relationships between tools and art: tools can be a metaphor for creation, for labor, and for art. Tools as Art is also a time capsule, documenting changes in means of production – from hand labor to industrialized assembly to computer-generated output.

The Hechinger Collection came into being in 1978 when the hardware industry pioneer John Hechinger found that his new company headquarters in Landover, Maryland, was efficient but sterile. To counteract this lack of soul, Hechinger began collecting art that focused on the company’s very livelihood and exhibited it throughout the building to inspire employees. Tools as Art presents work by 63 famous and lesser-known artists, largely of the post-World War II era. Featured artists include Berenice Abbott, Arman, Jim Dine, Mel Edwards, Walker Evans, Jacob Lawrence, Fernand Léger, Donald Lipski, Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, and David Webster.

Tools as Art is sponsored, in part, by Kelloggs & Lawrence Hardware, with support from Best Plumbing Tile and Stone.

January 14, 2007 - April 8, 2007

Stephen T. Johnson: Interactive Tools

The Learning Center is proud to once again feature the original art of Stephen T. Johnson, whose Caldecott-winning Alphabet City paintings were among the first exhibitions in the space nearly 10 years ago. For this show, original paintings, printer proofs, drawings, models, and the usable tools that he devised for his best-selling children's books My Little Red Toolbox, My Little Blue Robot, and My Little Yellow Taxi will be on display. Come admire Johnson's innovative designs and see the Learning Center transformed into an interactive tool workshop.

January 14, 2007 - April 8, 2007

Video: The Way Things Go

Inside a warehouse, artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss built a precarious structure 100 feet long, made from common household items – tea kettles, tires, old shoes, balloons, wooden ramps, empty bottles, and candles. Then, using fire, water, and the principles of gravity, they created a spectacular chain reaction, a self-destructing performance of physical interactions, chemical reactions, and precisely crafted chaos worthy of Rube Goldberg. Called “the merry pranksters of contemporary art” (The New York Times), the Swiss duo of Fischli and Weiss documented their mad science experiment in this entertaining video.