Symbolic Languages:
Children's Understandings of the Collection
How do children perceive, interpret, and evaluate works of art? Presented in partnership with the Rollins College Hume House Child Development & Student Research Center (CDC), Symbolic Languages: Children’s Understandings of the Collection is the museum’s first exhibition collaboratively curated with children ages 2 to 5 enrolled in the CDC’s laboratory preschool. Informed by the Reggio Emilia principle that children use “one hundred languages” to construct and communicate their understanding of the world, Symbolic Languages features various interpretive approaches that demonstrate how the child curators appreciated and were inspired by works from the collection, including those by Elizabeth Catlett, Chuck Close, Gregory Gillespie, and David Stern. In addition to showcasing the children’s responses, the exhibition is the culmination of a research study by the CDC’s leadership, whose findings are published in a freely available, exhibition booklet that also includes an essay chronicling the CDC’s fifty-year history.
The exhibition was collaboratively curated by RMA’s Associate Curator of Education David Matteson, the CDC’s Executive Director Dr. Alice Davidson and Director Diane Terorde-Doyle, and 30 preschool children.
