Artists' Table with Brian Belott

Join us on Saturday, August 9 for a special presentation by curator Brian Belott on the themes of his current exhibition, UPSIDE DOWN ZEBRA, followed by an intimate seated lunch inspired by the exhibition. UPSIDE DOWN ZEBRA features over 900 works selected from the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection, the most comprehensive archive of its kind, alongside responses by 40 contemporary artists who draw inspiration from the children’s spontaneous gestures and from Kellogg’s visionary approach.

ABOUT ARTISTS' TABLE Artists’ Table is Watermill’s year-round brunch and dinner series, offering guests the chance to intimately connect with our Artists-in-Residence. Artists’ Table features a private presentation by our international artists, followed by a chef-prepared meal with locally-sourced ingredients.

ABOUT BRIAN BELOTT Brian Belott has been widely shown for two decades internationally and has work in many prominent public and private collections. Throughout his career, Belott has playfully situated dissimilar objects, ideas and found oddities alongside one another in order to see what they might create. Box fans and cotton balls; collections of children’s books; found calculators bejewelled with stones; cats with clocks for eyes: Belott’s dadaist campaign is intent on making ordinary things as weird as they can be and, in doing so, create a new kind of (wholly illogical) logic. Belott’s artistic practice spans paintings, assemblage, music, performance, video, and a wholly separate project focusing on children's art, supporting the research development and encouragement of children's art through traveling shows and classes for children.

ABOUT THE RHODA KELLOGG INTERNATIONAL CHILD ART COLLECTION Rhoda Kellogg (1898-1987) was an early childhood scholar, educator, author, and activist who pioneered the study and analysis of children’s art, most significantly as the designer and director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Preschool. Over six decades, she collected over two million pieces of children’s art from across the globe. The resulting Kellogg International Child Art Collection represents the largest survey of children’s art ever conducted.

Cataloging children’s markings from around the world, Kellogg created a universal classification system for understanding the development of graphic expression in young children. She recognized that children’s artistic development follows a universal continuum, identifying twenty ‘basic scribbles’ which form the building blocks of art.

Kellogg’s anthropological approach to children’s artistic development posited that the repetitive motifs emerging from children’s joyful, energetic “aesthetic urges” were not just random scribblings. Instead, she argued that “art is biological,” identifying patterns in children’s art that traverse cultures, languages, and generations. Kellogg recognized the profound role of visual expression in the emergence of consciousness and positioned children’s mark-making as an intuitive form of communication.

Artists' Table at The Watermill Center is supported by Drs. Mark and June Halsey and Halsey Dermatology.

Also check out other Arts events in Water Mill, Kids events & activities in Water Mill, Exhibitions in Water Mill.