Childish Work

 Curated by Inga Manticas

December 9- 13, 2025

Reception: Friday, Dec 12th | 6-8P

Featuring Works by 

     Quan Apollo
Conner Calhoun
Sammi Eady
Zaire Miles-Moultrie & Will Harvey
Melanie McAllister
Megan Mehta
meow meow
Maggie Murphy
Pascal Peppe
Sabi Reyes
Mallie Sanford
Wendy Small
Nill Smith

More About Childish Work

Over the last several years, I’ve noticed the adult artists around me increasingly using mediums, processes, and imagery traditionally associated with children’s art. Finger-painting, dolls, comic strips, family photos, imaginary friends, toilet humor, miniatures, scribbles, stencils, stickers, and proudly amateurish craftsmanship started to show up everywhere in my friends’ artwork, and in mine. As we approached 25 or 30 or 40, we seemed to be reaching back further into our creative histories for our materials and inspiration.  

My peers weren’t afraid of their work being labeled “childish.” Rather, they welcomed comparison to the work of children, and sought out resonance with the artwork that they themselves had made as kids. This way of working wasn’t purely escapist. It wasn’t a  rejection of the complexities of the world in favor of simplicity or ignorance. Rather, these artists were each trying to weave a different form of consciousness – a childlike consciousness – into their work, to access parts of their world that were much less rich, or perhaps simply  incomprehensible, when explained through purely “adult” terms.  

So, the title of this show, Childish Work, turns an insult into an aspiration, or a genre. The show brings together fourteen artists who I have met in New York and North Carolina, each with a different connection to making childish work. 

Some of the artists in the show make work out of found objects taken directly from their childhoods, like dollhouses and Fisher Price TVs. Others paint with their fingers or draw scenes on Shrinky Dinks. Others emulate the graphic styles of coloring books and comics. Others attempt to recreate distant childhood memories. Others make works that reference the forms of toys and dolls: objects that could hypothetically be played with, but also demand closer observation and may even repel touch.  

Some of the artists in the show are current or former child educators, others are parents, others are the children of other artists in the show, others have collaborated directly with children to make the works in the show. Some of these artists appear to be in dialogue with their sense of their own child-self, blending adult precision with childlike play. Others reference childhood from an adult distance or use childlike materials to make an explicitly political statement. Others fully embody a childlike consciousness – or, put more simply, they just behave like children. Here, that’s a compliment.  

Curatorial Statement by Inga Manticas 

I started this curatorial process with the questions: What does it mean to work in a child-like way, and why do it?

These questions splintered into a myriad of other questions:  

• Is childlike work always nostalgic? Can childlike work be future-thinking? Can childlike work live in the present with no clear reference to the past? 
• To what extent has children’s creativity been underestimated and/or limited by the mass-produced tools we associate with kids’ arts and crafts? And so what does it mean for an adult to use those same tools? How are these things conditioned by the time in which we were born; our class, ethnicity, and location; the kind of formal education we received?
• What psychological or emotional space do artists tap into to make childish work, and what strategies do they use to reach this space?
• Does childlike work always have something to say about childhood itself? How and why do artists use childlike means to talk about adult experience?
• Is making childlike work always about respecting and valuing children’s intelligence enough to emulate it? Or, when does childlike work mock or objectify the child in order to communicate an adult perspective?
• How does childlike work intersect with other discourses about diverse forms of intelligence, embodiment, and ability?
• What do we often lack or fail to embody when we pursue a state of childlike creativity?
• In what ways do we commonly idealize childhood, and what do we leave out?
• What can an adult artist’s use of childlike strategies in a particular body of work tell us about their practice in general?  

The works in this show answer these questions in a lot of beautiful, off-putting, gross, cute, and funny ways.

I once heard a fellow teacher (I don’t remember who, or else I would credit them for this line) say, “Children are closer to our ancestors because they just arrived here on earth; they just came from the place where the dead live.” Our subsequent conversation moved through the idea that children are connected to a sense of time and place that is infinite and undivided, but not untouched by life.

When I think about this, I imagine that as an adult, making childlike work is about pursuing a kind of sight and speech that is expansively connective, but which also bubbles up from a very deep, internal space. It is emotional, immediate, responsive, and unburdened by the performance of sophistication. It is an intelligence that is so unrestrained that it might access some new idea or new realm (whether within us or outside of us) beyond the comfort zone of our “adult” minds. Of course, this is merely an ideal, but I can feel many of the artists in this show reaching towards it - and also just trying to have fun.