Prolific kid artists spur a keepsake conundrum

My 7-year-old daughter, Evie, creates art like a woman driven mad by inspiration.

We have piles of family portraits, carrot-people in hair bows and girls flying over lava to save the world.

The laundry basket I’m using for this school year already overflows with her work.

As Evie tells it, she’s the best artist in the world.

As an art lover, I can’t agree; as a mom, though, I certainly do. I treasure her best work as much as my favorite professional pieces.

I give her free rein to hang her pieces — and it’s a delight to, say, go into my room and find a corona of new Evie drawings ringing the bed headboard. (She uses reusable adhesive putty with names such as Sticky Tack and Tak ‘N Stick.)

But the time has come to bring order to the chaos.

To find out what other parents do, I started asking. The woman waiting behind me at an Ohio BMV deputy registrar’s office gives her grade-schooler one poster board a year; together, she and her son decide what makes the cut.

Some of my Facebook friends take photos of their kids’ artworks to save digitally. A smaller number then have them printed into photo books, or cycle them through a digital frame.

A publicist recommended GoodHangups, magnetic stickers used on a wall, with little magnets holding the artwork to the stickers. I like that, unlike the putty tack, they leave no oily residue.

No parent told me that they hang pictures on the refrigerator — my mom’s old go-to. I suspect that’s because of the proliferation of nonmagnetic stainless steel.

Refrigerators did come up, though.

“I don’t think you have

to just display it in the kids’ room or on the refrigerator,” said Michelle Brandt, owner of Brandt-Roberts Galleries in the Short North and mother of Evers, 15, and Roman, 11.

“I’m an arts advocate, so I want to see their work next to other works in our house.”

Brandt frames her favorites — which aren’t always her sons’ favorites. She laughed as she shared how she got the “ugh, Mom” reaction after she framed a photo one son had taken of the chickens in their yard. He didn’t consider the shot worthy.

Brandt also likes shadowboxes for 3-D pieces, such as a soncreated lizard sculpture she paired with a colorful matte.

After my fairly widespread but unscientific survey, I would say that most kid art gets dropped into plastic bins. (Brandt recommends recording on the back of each the date, the artist’s name and — when not obvious — what the art shows.)

More-organized parents regularly weed out their bins, sometimes with their kids’ input, to keep the pile manageable.

“Honestly,” Brandt said, “there’s so much work that you just can’t keep everything.”

I sometimes sneak Evie’s most- dashedoff drawings into the recycling bin. She sometimes picks them

■ Don’t let stored works touch cardboard, which is acidic.

“It’s awful,” she said. “It can just eat away at the paper.”

Plastic bins are better. If you have pieces that you especially care about, sandwich them between

back out.

Evie is confident — maybe overconfident — in the value of her work. But what’s wrong with that? There’ll be enough life events that knock her around and bruise that self-view.

■ Know that the medium matters.

“They’re not using the most archival-quality pigments in school settings,” Brandt said. “You almost have to be more careful with school projects.”

For now, I want Evie to see her work showcased at home and know she has reason to be proud — and her parents do, too.