At the KSMoCA International Art Fair this past August, the first clue that this was no ordinary art fair was the size of the booths. Painted and spackled by students from Martin Luther King Jr. School in Portland, Oregon, the stands were just slightly taller than they were. The fair presented artwork from 17 international exhibitors in the school cafeteria, where on a normal school day, kids can be found eating pizza or attending assembly.
Over the course of the weekend-long event, attendees could browse and purchase artwork, watch performances from local musicians, and participate in a mini-recreation of artist Pedro Reyes’s interactive performance work Sanatorium.
As hosts of the fair, students had various responsibilities. Some were tasked with setup, including creating and hanging signage; others engaged with the public on behalf of a gallery, like the Blue Sky Gallery, where students had curated the selection of art on display. Some students chose to create spontaneous work to sell on the spot, while others spoke in discussion panels, responding to questions about being artists and art-fair organizers.
“It was about valuing the kids, putting them in this role that normally adults would be in and treating it like it was a normal thing,” says Harrell Fletcher, an artist, founder of the MFA program in Art & Social Practice at Portland State University, and co-director of the King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA). “The hope is that these little moments will be significant to them.”
Hosted by arts nonprofit Converge45, the fair was organized by KSMoCA, a kid-run museum that was realized in collaboration with Portland State’s Art & Social Practice students. Since 2014, KSMoCA’s official home has been at MLK Jr. School, a public school with students from kindergarten through eighth grade. PSU students work with students there to curate exhibitions and create new works, often in a single hallway between the cafeteria and gym.
KSMoCA puts a particular emphasis on introducing students to contemporary art and living artists. Arts education is woefully behind the times, Fletcher notes, when Andy Warhol is the last contemporary artist most people can name. If the kids are going to grow up to be artists, they’re going to be contemporary ones, he posits. So rather than gluing googly eyes or tracing their hands to make turkeys, kids of KSMoCA are exploring, from a young age, the endless possibilities of artmaking. They’re trained to push boundaries, even when it comes to what art can be.
“Contemporary art rejects notions of how art has always been seen, and who gets to call things art,” says PSU art professor Lisa Jarrett, who is co-director of KSMoCA. “So who gets to identify art is really up to you. That’s what we’d like―to get the kids to feel more and more empowered in that way.”
