At Wallach Art Gallery, Artists Find Beauty and Darkness in Child’s Play

It’s not easy being a kid. Hungry? Dirty? Want to go to the playground? You are at the mercy of others. In the 1970s, though, a Polish child named Maksymilian Dobromierz had it especially rough: His parents, conceptual artists who went by the name KwieKulik, had him pose for hundreds of bizarre photos: in a toilet bowl, or surrounded by silverware or with a bucket over his head. Dobromierz, to his credit, appears to have taken it all in stride.

Forty-eight of these images by KwieKulik appear as a gridded piece in “Growing Sideways: Performing Childhood,” a smart exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University with more than a dozen artists that have been inspired by or collaborated with children. Organized by Piper Marshall, an independent curator, it is by turns heartwarming and unsettling, examining how young and old understand, learn from and control one another.

About 20 bright, charismatic kites by Joan Jonas hang from the ceiling, a kid’s dream. Two colorful, cartoony paintings by Sable Elyse Smith are pleasurable sights until you look closely. In one, families are winding their way through a maze. “Can you help Pat to the metal detector?” text below the graphic asks. Smith sourced her imagery from a coloring book for prepping children to visit a courthouse.

A diaper-clad baby is utter freedom, standing alone in a party hat (or dunce cap?) in a 2020 Tala Madani painting, splatters of blood-red paint all about. Nearby, in a 1947 Gordon Parks photograph, a young Black boy is asked by a researcher whether he prefers a doll with light or dark skin, participating in a study that laid bare segregation’s psychic toll.

Artists are behaving like children — Tina Keane sits in a playpen in photos of a 1979 performance, and Ericka Beckman dances in a schoolgirl uniform in a 1978 video — but it is the actual children who steal the show, unsurprisingly. (Childhood is “a period of marvelous vision” that “disappears without a trace,” Picasso said.) Aura Rosenberg’s daughter, Carmen, commandeered her mother’s sunglasses while wearing goth garb for a 1996 shoot that the artist conceptualized with Mike Kelley, and she looks very much in charge.

The show’s stars are delightful animated short films that children made by cutting paper and drawing in the 1960s and ’70s, under the guidance of the filmmaker and teacher Yvonne Andersen. A wicked witch kidnaps naïve trick-or-treaters in one; in another, anthropomorphized pieces of garbage attack a girl. Their creators were clearly having a ball. You may find yourself wishing you had half their talent.

Growing Sideways: Performing Childhood

Through Sept. 15 at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, 615 West 129th Street, Manhattan; 212-854-6800; wallach.columbia.edu.