CityFront: Environmental initiation

Art and recycling are combined at the Israel Museum to inculcate children with the values of conservation and preservation over needless waste.

By GILI MALINSKY
Arts and Crafts 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Arts and Crafts 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The environmental arts & crafts room in the Youth and Education Wing of the Israel Museum smells like glue. Its walls are white, one lined with large-volume water containers filled with CD cases, wooden brush handles, used slides, colorful fabric and more. This is the wall with a gas station sign above that reads “Self Service.”
Another wall is lined with shelves of plastic containers filled with stickers, cardboard toilet rolls, plastic bags, etc. with instructions on how to make one of three items: flowers in a pot, a picture of a train or one of a fish bowl.
On this wall, a a gas station sign reads “Full Service.”
“Okay, let’s start,” says Telma Shultz, associate curator and head of the Recycling Room, to the children, parents, grandparents and babysitters sitting at the four tables in preparation for the recycling workshop. “How do you wake up in the morning?” “Sometimes people wake me up,” says one kid.
“I do it on my own,” says another.
As per every recycling workshop, held weekly at the museum, this month’s activities are based on the main exhibition at the Youth and Education Wing, “Life: A User’s Manual.” The exhibition explores the many instructions that carry us through our daily lives, sometimes simply pointing them out and other times challenging them.
“Those who like instructions,” says Shultz, “can pick a box and must do only what it says in the instructions.
Those who want to make anything they want can use the wall of free materials.”
Conversations start immediately, kids swarming tables standing up or sitting down as they apply glue to purple, bristle-free toothbrushes or smooth out pieces of green plastic bags. Grandparents and babysitters sit by, cutting material.
The Israel Museum’s hands-on recycling workshop aims to hone in on the idea of waste and forge a connection between the kids who participate and the art exhibitions presented at the wing.
“Artistic activities are always a good way to touch on subject matters,” says Schultz, who has been leading workshops at the museum since 1993. “The artistic experience in this workshop raises awareness about the importance of preserving the Earth and its resources and exposes children to modern art showcased in the museum.”
Five-year-old Tali is no stranger to using recycled material and creating. As she sits waiting for the glue of her pot of flowers to dry, she explains how she created an entire family of figures using materials she found at home.
“For the body I used a toilet roll, and for the arms and legs I used straw. For the eyes, nose and mouth, I drew.”
“They’ve learned about recycling at kindergarten,” says her mother, Jo, about Tali and her twin brother, Ben.
“They used to put bottles in those bottle recycling bins with their grandma, and they know that all these things are usually thrown away.” But, she explains, even today’s exercise has added value. “We just talked about the fact that the flowers we made today don’t even need watering, so they’re even more eco-friendly!” “The subject of recycling really interests our grandkids,” says Micha Cohn, who came to the workshop with their grandchildren Ayelet and Ofek, busy at work on their art projects.
“What I’ve learned about recycling is that you can recycle everything,” says eight-year-old Ofek.”It doesn’t pollute, it’s fun, you help the environment, and it’s also good for you.”
The workshop, he says, is a good way to focus on the ideas of recycling because “You can learn more than one way to recycle.”
High school seniors-to-be Daniel Tyomkin and Hillel Behar have been working at the museum and specifically at the workshop for three years, watching kids learn by craft to think deeply about the materials they use and connect with ideas from the exhibitions presented.
“If we don’t learn things through experience, it doesn’t stick,” says Behar of the hands-on aspect of the activity.
“especially for kids who are five or six who are just beginning to think [critically]. If they do the work and see the toothbrush they’re using to create something, then they think about it. ‘This could have been a toothbrush, but it’s not anymore. Instead of throwing it out, I’m here making the body of a child or a bride and groom,’” he says.
“It’s always connected to the exhibit,” says Tyomkin.
“For Pessah we made frogs and on Hanukka we made menoras.”
Schultz also mentions the Still/Moving exhibition, which includes a room full of black butterflies by Carlos Amorales, where children created black butterflies as decorations for Succot.
Tali Gavish, head of the Israel Museum’s Youth and Education Wing, explains that ultimately, the idea behind both the activity and the exhibition is to offer exciting ways to learn. “Learning is a wonderful thing, and the ethic behind the recycling workshop and the exhibits. In all the things we do here, we think about how to make learning more fun and effective.”
When creating an exhibition, the Youth and Education Wing’s team considers what a visitor might know about a given subject and what they’d like that person to leave knowing. Once they’ve honed in on how they’d like the person to feel or what subject matter they want the visitor to be more well versed about, they develop exhibits and activities around it. Most importantly, learning comes from doing. “The person learning is doing it, experiencing it creating on their own. That’s the idea,” she says.
“The recycling workshop is part of that understanding,” says Gavish. “Give kids materials and let their ideas flow.”
In terms of using the recycling workshop to make exhibits at the Youth and Education Wing more graspable, she says that “Some kids think the museum is a little complicated. But the recycling workshop with fun materials is a positive experience. It’s so much fun working in the inspiration of the exhibition, that they are much more prepared to go and see the exhibit itself.”
The workshop’s arts & crafts room has a tiny window into the exhibition “Life: A User’s Manual.” Kids can look through the window and see where the inspiration for the recycling workshop came from.
At the exhibition, children and their parents can be seen walking around exploring, asking questions and navigating the art presented. The exhibition’s introduction says the following: “Only rarely do we wake up in the morning without receiving an instruction to do so, be it from the alarm clock or from someone urging us to get up… The artists whose works are exhibited here sometimes follow instructions, and at other times oppose them… The exhibition invites you to examine day-to-day activities as a response to instructions.
It raises the question whether there is a difference between suggestions, guidance, requests, demands and commands, and what makes us obey instructions, disregard them or resist them.”
Covering the wooden floors of the exhibition are turquoise instructions explaining how to make popcorn, outlining exactly where to cut, showing steps to tango and more. At the collection of numbered footprints, a father counts “One, two, three” as his daughters jump from footprint to footprint.
A little girl in a striped tank top and pink sunglasses stops at artist May Attoun’s piece, which asks, “Can one make a skull?” The piece features a glass case filled with skulls made of PVC and instructions on how to create them. She thus poses the question of the importance of original archeological artifacts when such pieces can so easily be reproduced by following instructions.
I another exhibit, a yellowing textbook of Renaissance paintings explains how to draw. And upon reaching the staircase that leads to the next floor, one may read writer Julio Cortazar’s “Instructions for Climbing the Stairs.”
On the top floor are truck parts hanging from the ceiling far enough away from one another that they beg to be assembled. And there is an Andy Warhol print of a banana with a small arrow on the wall that reads “Peel here.”
And at the exit, the floor reads “Upon exiting the exhibition, bid the guard a polite farewell.”