Whitney Wees: Picturing People
Mar 2, 2011
Whitney Wees is the Museum’s signature program for families with kids ages four and five. Each month, families explore a different theme during an hour-long interactive tour led by a Whitney educator. On February 12, our theme was Picturing People, focusing on works in the exhibitions Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time and Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection to discover the variety of ways that artists depict people.
Whitney Wees educator Lisa Libicki discusses George Bellows’s Dempsey and Firpo with families, February 2011. Photograph by Desi Gonzalez
Families were introduced to George Bellows’s painting Dempsey and Firpo (1924). Bellows, who began his career as a sports illustrator for a daily newspaper, was assigned to cover the prizefight between defending heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey, and Argentinean boxer, Luis Firpo. Although Dempsey eventually won the fight, Bellows chose to portray the dramatic moment when Firpo’s punch knocks Dempsey out of the ring. After discussing how Bellows represented emotions such as shock and worry in the faces of the audience, kids practiced a range of poses and facial expressions. Families drew mini self-portraits on sticker paper, imagining how they would react to the commotion in the boxing ring, and then added these images into a color print-out of the painting.
Kids and parents identify characters from pop culture in Andy Warhol’s Myths, February 2010. Photograph by Desi Gonzalez
Bellows depicted the fighters and spectators in the midst of action, whereas Andy Warhol represented various pop culture figures through close-up portraits in his 1981 screenprint painting, Myths. Kids had a blast identifying characters from television, film, and other types of media, from Mickey Mouse to the Wicked Witch of the West. Each of the ten portraits is repeated vertically down the canvas in shades of gray and silver, resembling a filmstrip. Warhol even included a portrait of himself—at that point an artworld icon—in the right column.
Parents and kids collaborated to make their own Warhol-inspired works. After choosing three people or characters they wanted to represent, each family member drew portraits in a filmstrip-style template. We then taped kids’ and parents’ artwork side by side. Just as in Warhol’s portraits in Myths, the families’ characters were repeated, but no two figures were exactly the same.
Learn more about Whitney Wees and register for upcoming programs.
By Desi Gonzalez, Education Assistant