PLAYGROUND OF MY MIND
Prestel (hardcover, 62 pages)
IN THIS MEMOIR-MEETS-GRAPHIC-NOVEL, artist and educator Julia Jacquette asks, “How does the design of your childhood environment affect you? Does it help shape how you think?” Much like Inventing Kindergarten, in which Norman Brosterman persuasively argues that the abstract educational toys of Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten shaped modern art and architecture, Playground of My Mind is a compelling ode to the ways our childhood environments form and inform us. For Jacquette, these early backdrops include some of New York’s most celebrated playscapes, such as Richard Dattner’s Adventure Playground in Central Park, and M. Paul Friedberg’s multi-level play area, which was sited in the courtyard of the author’s childhood apartment building. Unlike the typical swing, seesaw and slide arrangement, these modernist playgrounds gave striking form to a new set of rational and utopian ideals, in which play was not prescribed but open-ended. In material terms this meant linked play areas, concrete structures, running water, sand and pared-down geometric forms. “The interconnectivity of everything was thrilling…” the author recalls. “Unlike a closed system, a work of art or design can suggest endless possibilities and variations. It can give us the building blocks, or the structure, or the system to play with.” As Jacquette is the daughter of an architect and a librarian, it seems all the more fitting that she should search for the building blocks of her life by exploring its architecture – in the pages of a book.
→ Julia Jacquette: Unrequited and Acts of Play is a travelling exhibition featuring 60 of the gouache works the artist created for Playground of My Mind. The show is on view at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit, New Jersey, September 24 to January 14, 2018
Kimberlie Birks is a New York writer. Though her childhood sandboxes were in Montreal, her master’s thesis on the playscapes of New York means that she has spent a lot of time with that city’s playgrounds on her mind.