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Face To Face

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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 the Museum’s 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.

Special thanks to Allison Russo, Mandy Talbot, and Joe Vena for their work on this exhibition. Support for this show is generously provided in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Also on view

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    In the Bridge Space Bridge Projects: Patrick Martinez

    Since the 1990’s, Patrick Martinez has been exploring different forms of expression:  video art, sound art, drawing, installation and design.  Using a wide range of media, he establishes experimental structures to examine ideas about process, action, mobility, adaptation and resistance.  His work investigates the relationship between an object and its presentation in order to challenge our perception.

    In the Bridge, the viewer must navigate a monumental installation consisting of thousands and thousands of straws. Patrick Martinez uses his recently commercialized construction kit JIX.  JIX is a well-designed plastic connector, conceived to allow drinking straws to build sculptural forms that can be as structured and methodical or completely chaotic as desired, while reaching almost unlimited scale and volume at the same time as being virtually weightless. These connectors consists of small modular elements that are specifically designed to allow standard drinking straws to be connected together in order to create a wide variety of constructions, from ambitious room-sized structures to intricate table-top sculptures.

    Patrick Martinez was born 1969 in Besancon, France.  He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Besançon and Grenoble and at The Institute of High Studies in Visual Arts in Paris.  In 1997, he received a grant to work in Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for 3 years before finally settling in New York. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally in Europe as well as in Brazil and Japan.  His work is represented by Parker Box Gallery in New York.

    “I was interested in making gigantic structures that were as immaterial as possible and bring a sense of density out of fragility. Using straws, which are mostly filled with air, as a building material, seemed like the appropriate response. Also, I consider the JIX project as a 3D extension of my drawing practice, based on repetition and space/time occupation.

    The bridge/corridor at the the CMA will allow me to create an immersive sculpture like a tunnel or a cave, which I hope will be an engaging environment for kids, where   they could hide, play, or just do nothing and rest. By changing the scale of the bridge, I ‘d like to create a space that kids could relate to. Also, JIX is a construction kit, and through workshops, children will be able to build and create things by themselves. Touching is a good way to understand your environment and to acquire experience and knowledge. This applies to art too.”

    –Patrick Martinez,  2013

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