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Face To Face is an exploration of self and identity through still, moving, and living portraits, as portrayed by children using traditional methods of painting and drawing, as well as technology. This exhibit celebrates CMA’s 25th anniversary with the most comprehensive show to date of its permanent collection of children’s art, which spans over fifty countries with works dating back to the 1930s.

CMA’s Permanent Collection was established in 1990, when the museum sent letters to hundreds of countries seeking children’s artwork. The bulk of CMA’s collection was gathered in the weeks that followed, as hundreds of packages of children’s work arrive from all over the world. The collection is now comprised of work from as far away as China, Pakistan, Argentina, Ethiopia, Russia, and Senegal, and as close a Harlem, Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

This exhibition seeks to demonstrate the ways in which each young artist has rendered themselves or others; viewed together, the exhibition represents the diversity of self-expression and identity of children across the world and over time.