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still from the cartoon "the look make show"
Courtesy Children’s Museum of the Arts

A New Cartoon Uses Art to Teach Kids How to Confront Life’s Challenges

Kathryn O’Shea-Evans

May 1, 2021
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Arts education opportunities faded fast for kids in the learn-from-home fog of Covid-19. That’s where The Look Make Show, a new TV program by New York City’s Children’s Museum of the Arts, hopes to come in. The cartoon, of which the creators are raising funds to make future episodes via a Kickstarter campaign through May 14, focuses on Rod and Coney, two rotund, charismatic artists who refuse to let the pandemic get in the way of sharing their work with the world. “We’ve been stuck inside, rotting our brains with television,” Rod says on the pilot, which you can watch on the museum’s Kickstarter. “But that’s when it hit us: What if we made a TV show about making art, so all our friends can see the art we’re making, and we can see all the art that they make?”

The pair decides to pitch their idea to area producers, demonstrating the series’ smart approach to teaching in the process: a conversation with an executive about her bologna sandwich becomes a color exercise based on artist Josef Albers’s 1963 book Interaction of Color; a future-tripping Coney imagines a “Rodument”—a monument built by a power-hungry Rod—then envisions an abstract community-built sculpture garden that reflects their ever-evolving values. Future episodes will tackle topics such as cultural appropriation, coping with anxiety, and how people with different ideas can work together to inspire change.

Positioning art as a way of learning how to be a part of the world was important to Seth Cameron, the museum’s executive director and creator of the show. “It’s my priority to make sure we’re giving kids the tools to think about how they can live their lives creatively,” Cameron says, noting that TV programs, not visits to museums, often provide a child’s first experience with art. Once funding for the cartoon is secured, kids will be able to respond to themes explored in the show through museum programs such as after-school classes and summer camps. Given that youngsters as far away as Israel and London have tuned in to the institution’s digital programming over the past year, Cameron sees the program as an urgent project that teaches the young viewers valuable lessons about confronting life’s challenges. “We’re thinking about a much larger audience,” Cameron says, “and making something we can share with the world.”

# Media# New York# Museums# Art

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It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.