IMAGINING INTO THE MUSEUM / Participatory Drawing Project

During Winter of 2022, at a virtual gathering of PSU’s CORE program, we invited first-year students to recreate a selection of artifacts from the collection of Five Oaks Museum. We combed through over 40,000 items and chose a selection of toys and games, creating unique artifact label for each item based on the museum’s available data. We then invited the students to draw the listed artifacts in the way they instinctually imagined them, without any visual reference. 

We chose this way of approaching the collection in part because of the forced distance of the pandemic - both the museum and the university class were remote - but also because we, as artists and parents, are interested in play and in the relationship between texts and the images they conjure in our imaginations. We asked the students to invite play into their process, and embrace the potential for discrepancy, slippage, and creative misinterpretation as they translated their label to image. All the drawings were collected in a publication. See below: