"I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."

A group of sixth-graders spoke with Barb Smith about her work in the gallery on June 8, 2016.

“I drew the one that has the teeth marks… the pink thing. It kind of looks like if you go to the dentist and then if you have to get braces and you have to get the mold. I think the artist bit into it.”

“I drew that thing that looks like a bunch of buildings in the Bronx because it has little things sticking out and some buildings are like that.”

“I think it came from a hard material. I think they made it so it wouldn’t break or something.”
“The grey spirals. The metal. Because it’s silver and the ones that are around it are the same color.”

My friends. This is your one chance to ask anything to the artist. Make her sweat a little bit. Ask a hard question.

“How many things did you use to make that basket?”

I used a lot of stuff. It took me probably two weeks to make that one. Two weeks on one thing so it took a really long time.

“What is that?”

What do you think it is? Make up a story about that and tell me what you think it is.

“It reminds me of treasure.”

“It kind of looks like a monument.”

“It kind of looks like an ancient temple. There might be some kind of treasure here, and those balls look like they could be a trap.”

“They look like they’re from ancient times, because people collect stuff from a long time ago to now.”

“They use them as tools. This one looks like it’s from an Indian because they used to make these and we learned about it in social studies. This other stuff looks like it came from the earth, like volcanoes. That other one looks like a fossil.”

“It was found in the mountains a long time ago.”

“What is that made of? The foot thing.”

Do you guys know what Memory Foam is? It makes pillows and beds. Memory Foam holds your impression, but you know how once you let go it loses your impression? So I used Memory Foam for that, but I broke it. So that it would hold the impression of me standing on my tiptoes.

“How and why did you make that?”

So you know that the New York World’s Fair was here. So I was thinking about getting to go there and I thought that if I wanted to see, I might not be tall enough so I imagined standing on my tiptoes. So I made an impression of me standing on my tiptoes.

What would you say about this right here if you had to? This is artwork by Barb Smith and it is about…

“About a timeline.”

“About different things mixed up.”

Maybe it’s a timeline where everything’s out of order. What might that mean? Why is it like a timeline, what makes you think of time?

“It makes me think of time because those look really old because I never saw them before.”

It’s a lot of different places and a lot of different times attached to these elements. Do you guys have a favorite memory? Maybe in your rooms at home you keep little things that remind you of it like a memento or a souvenir? These are some of my objects that are like mementos and memories. Where I grew up, in Indiana, which is pretty far from here, there is the oldest glass factory in the U.S. and they still manufacture glass to make stained glass. Four times a year they break their kilns and crucibles into little pieces and replace them. And this is a piece of the furnace where they heat the glass to liquid. And over a long period of time the glass gets into the brick and makes something that looks like a fossil. I went and dug through their trash and took home a box of their trash because I thought it was treasure.
I was paying very close attention that day.

“I got this idea of golf.”

“Looks like an ancient temple”

“There might be some kind of treasure here and those balls look like they could be really big in real life and maybe it’s a trap.”

“A trap”

Ha! It does look like a trap all over. That’s a very good point. So we are not supposed to touch these things but did you ever wonder what it would feel like?

“Squishy”

“Soft”

Can we touch a tiny bit? Yes. Today is special, only today we can touch. It smells funny too right?