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For kids: Watch it – this art is on the move!
Kids (and grown-ups) love to nudge the 'cloud' balloons as they drift by at a moving art exhibit.
By Sue Wunderfrom the January 8, 2008 edition
Page 1 of 2
If you've been to an art museum, you were probably warned on your way through the door: "Just look. Don't touch!" Putting so much as a finger on a framed canvas is a no-no. But kids and adults who walk into an exhibit of Andy Warhol's "Silver Clouds" hear a different message.
"Go ahead and touch the clouds – push them around," Erika Myers-Bromwell told a young visitor to the New Harmony (Ind.) Gallery of Contemporary Art one day last November. Ms. Myers-Bromwell is assistant director of the museum, and she had also assured me that it was OK to touch the silver, cloud-shaped balloons. I could even bounce them off the walls if I liked. And the "clouds" could touch me, too, I learned, as I ducked out of the way of one floating toward me.
Andy Warhol, a "pop" artist of the 20th century, thought up the original Silver Clouds display as a kinetic (moving) art form in the 1960s. Billy Klüver, a Swedish electronics engineer, helped Warhol with the design. In those days, the clouds were made of "Scotchpak," a metallized plastic film used in food packaging. Today, the balloons are made of Mylar, another type of metallic plastic. The first exhibit of Silver Clouds appeared in New York City at the Leo Castelli Gallery, which is famous for showcasing contemporary art.
These days, any museum that wants to can order clouds (think of that!) from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which houses a permanent Silver Clouds exhibit.
When preservationist Jane Owen saw Silver Clouds at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) at Saint Louis University in January 2006, she was captivated. She immediately decided to bring the exhibit to her hometown. With the help of the Rev. Terry Dempsey at MOCRA, she did just that. The exhibit is in New Harmony through the end of January.
Silver Clouds is unlike most museum displays mainly because you can touch the art and push it around. You can see yourself in the clouds' reflective surfaces. And you're even invited to lie down on the floor for a different point of view! So I did. I watched the clouds drift overhead the way I've done on a hillside under real clouds. When one of the silver clouds passed by close enough, I gave it a gentle nudge and watched it quietly drift away.
Still, there are rules of exhibit behavior: "Be gentle," a sign says. The clouds are "sturdy but not indestructible." No kicking, running, roughhousing, or pillow fights. And watch where you step – there might be someone looking up at the clouds from the gallery floor.
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