Parents in the Avant Garde
A workshop setting within Nicole and Matt’s collaborative practice.
Parents in the Avant Garde · Water Mill, NY
The Watermill Center
Scribble Scores · family programming · Upside Down Zebra · 2026
At Watermill, there was a roomful of children’s drawings already there. Nicole and I brought paper and instruments into that conversation. Our Scribble Scores workshop took place with Upside Down Zebra, an exhibition drawing on the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection.
Drawing / listening
The marks are already doing something
A child makes a line and the line carries the movement that made it. We can follow that movement with a sound. Someone adds another mark; somebody else answers. The paper becomes a place where people of different ages can make decisions together.
The Watermill Center
A room of drawings, a room of people
Kellogg’s collection brings children’s mark-making into view as something to spend time with. The workshop adds another activity to that looking: the marks can be sounded and changed by the people around them. The instruments, the paper and the people are all part of how the room works.
Exhibition context
Upside Down Zebra
The exhibition paired children’s works from Kellogg’s collection with responses by contemporary artists. It ran from June 28, 2025 through May 30, 2026. Our family programming belongs to that conversation about what children’s marks can set in motion.