Wallach Art Gallery

Wallach Art Gallery Columbia University's premier gallery. Free and open to the public. The Miriam and Ira D.

Wallach Art Gallery advances Columbia University's historical, critical, and creative engagement with the visual arts. Serving as both a laboratory and a forum, The Wallach Art Gallery offers opportunities for curatorial practice and discourse, while bridging the diverse approaches to the arts at the University with a welcome broader public. We present projects that meet one or more of the followi

ng criteria:

---Are organized by graduate students and faculty in Art History & Archaeology or by other Columbia scholars,
---Focus on the contemporary artists of our campus, or
---Present new scholarship on University special collections. Established in 1986, The Wallach Art Gallery is the University's premier visual arts space, presenting numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions, a dynamic range of programming, and publications that have made lasting contributions to scholarship. Since its beginning the gallery has presented exhibitions that examine a broad range of cultures, time periods, and styles, some of which have traveled to other national and international venues. The Wallach Art Gallery also presents projects that animate other university spaces as opportunity arises. The Wallach Art Gallery operates in close relationship to the Department of Art History and Archaeology, School of the Arts, and the university Libraries, particularly Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.

Fiber artist and master crocheter Milagros Batista invites you to contribute to The Garden of Stitches. During this work...
09/05/2026

Fiber artist and master crocheter Milagros Batista invites you to contribute to The Garden of Stitches. During this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to crochet motif pieces that will become part of Batista’s installation at the Children’s Art Carnival at 62 Hamilton Terrace in Upper Manhattan.

No previous crochet experience is required and materials will be provided.

https://wallach.columbia.edu/events/wallach-workshop-garden-stitches

Sunday, September 13, 2:30-4:30 pm
Wallach Workshop:
The Garden of Stitches
Wallach Art Gallery
Lenfest Center for the Arts, 6th floor
New York City

Milagros Batista is a master fiber artist, fashion designer, and social activist whose work is steeped in Afro-Caribbean tradition and visionary craftsmanship. Born in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic and raised in the heart of New York City, Batista draws inspiration from her mother, her ancestors, and the vibrant textile cultures of Latin America as she transforms yarn into bold, contemporary expressions of identity and heritage. Her hand-crocheted garments are more than fashion—they are vessels of memory, resilience, and radical beauty.

Batista is the creative force behind Batista Collections, a crochet and knitwear brand specializing in custom wearable art that fuses art, fashion, and social commentary, She has twice exhibited at Latinista Fashion Week, and currently serves as an artist-in-residence at the Children’s Art Carnival, where she leads “The Garden of Stitches”—a vibrant collective healing initiative that invites community members to co-create large-scale yarn installations in gardens. Participants in the Wallach Workshop will have their contributions added to this ongoing community art project with the motto: “No perfection. Just connection.” This ongoing project transforms shared green spaces into living murals of color, care, and cultural pride.

“The Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists,” is on view at the Wallach Art Gallery from June 26 to September 13, 2026. Learn more in our link in bio.

Puppetry was frequently used within the Carnival's Creative Reading through the Arts program as a holistic approach to a...
09/04/2026

Puppetry was frequently used within the Carnival's Creative Reading through the Arts program as a holistic approach to art education. Children not only created puppets, but also wrote a script, performed in, and even recorded their own puppet shows on video, leading to improved reading, vocabulary, and communication skills. The program also had an effect on its teaching artists, such as the puppeteer, Brad Brewer.

Translating his intuitive artmaking process into a clear and concise lesson plan challenged Brewer to think more critically about his own creative methods, further hone his mastery of foundational artmaking principles, and enhance how he communicated his thoughts on the art of puppetry. In an interview he once stated, "I consider myself still a student of puppetry and...every time I'm working with any audience, especially young people, I feel like I'm still learning:"

“The Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists,” is on view at the Wallach Art Gallery from June 26 to September 13, 2026. Learn more in our link in bio.

Brad Brewer
The Duke, 1994
Foam rubber, ping pong balls, and fabric
Courtesy of the artist

This puppet, named after the jazz legend, Duke Ellington (a.k.a. The Duke), is from a production of Duke's Place, an original coming-of-age story featuring Ellington's music. The show was created and written by Brewer, founder of the Brewery Puppet Troupe, a groundbreaking all-Black puppet company he established in 1974.

Join us for a pair of presentations that consider the pedagogical underpinnings of the Children’s Art Carnival from its ...
09/03/2026

Join us for a pair of presentations that consider the pedagogical underpinnings of the Children’s Art Carnival from its inception at MoMA in 1942 to its re-imagining in 1969 as the Harlem Children’s Arts Carnival. The program will also explore the role of community organizations like the Children’s Art Carnival in relation to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and New York City public education.

Sunday, September 13, 1-2 pm
Radical Arts Education:
Youth Development and the Children's Art Carnival
Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room,
Lenfest Center for the Arts, 2nd Floor
New York City

To register for this program please use this link: https://wallach.columbia.edu/events/radical-arts-education-youth-development-and-childrens-art-carnival

Dr. kecia hayes has been a champion of antiracist k-12 leadership and praxis across a variety of organizational settings in New York City for more than two decades. Most recently, she led two community-focused organizations at Columbia University including the Double Discovery Center where she transformed the organization's approach to college access and support for low-income and first-generation community youth; and the Raising Educational Achievement Coalition in Harlem where she was the founding Director and chief architect of Teachers College's university-assisted, community school initiative. She is currently Senior Professorial Lecturer at American University’s Baker School of Education.

Sara Torres-Vega holds a PhD in Fine Arts and is an artist, educator, and researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Her work explores the potential of art as a tool for social transformation through archival projects and collaborative practices developed with institutions such as Tate in London, MoMA in New York, and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. She currently serves as Director of MAAAL (Museum of Art and Open-Air Learning) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists, on view at the Wallach Art Gallery through September 13.

The works on view by Michael Kelly Williams explore themes of music, spirituality, social justice, and the material and ...
09/02/2026

The works on view by Michael Kelly Williams explore themes of music, spirituality, social justice, and the material and narrative possibilities of found objects. For Williams these works represent his evolved artistic practice-deepened by the creative environment he found at the Carnival.

Williams’s years at the Carnival were formative, reverberating in the works on view made decades later.
While teaching ceramic sculpture and murals at the Carnival, he formed a deep bond with Carnival executive director Betty Blayton-Taylor, noting that she “became a mentor and a friend who encouraged me to keep reaching for higher levels in my own work.”

The two also connected through their shared interest in spirituality. Williams recalls engaging in conversations with Blayton-Taylor about the transformative possibilities of meditation, and the two even shared chanting sessions.

“The Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists,” is on view at the Wallach Art Gallery from June 26 to September 13, 2026. Learn more: https://wallach.columbia.edu/content/childrens-art-carnival-harlem-making-contemporary-artists

Michael Kelly Williams,
Teaching Artist, Children’s Art Carnival, 1979-1986
Things to Come from Those Now Gone, 2018. Mixed media sculpture.
Meditations, 2016. Mixed media sculpture.
For Geri, 2019. Mixed media sculpture.
Samta, 2017. Mixed media sculpture.

Thanks to American Craft and Kate Schuler for covering "The Children's Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporar...
09/01/2026

Thanks to American Craft and Kate Schuler for covering "The Children's Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists."

Interviews with exhibition curator Souleo, and artist instructors Michael Cummings and Sana Musasama bring to light how the children were not just receiving lessons in art.

The article states that Cummings "saw how his young students approached art instinctively and without constraint" as part of a larger examination of how an artistic community fosters creative exchange, one of the central themes of the exhibition.

Read the full article at craft council.org


._cummings

At The Museum of Modern Art on August 21, 2026, artist robin holder and educator Donna M. Jones were interviewed by Soul...
08/26/2026

At The Museum of Modern Art on August 21, 2026, artist robin holder and educator Donna M. Jones were interviewed by Souleo, curator of the Wallach Art Gallery exhibition “Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists.”

The event included remarks by MoMA director of public engagement Leonardo Bravo and Wallach Art Gallery associate director of education and public programs Jennifer Mock.

The Harlem Children's Art Carnival (1969–present) grew out of MoMA’s annual event-based art education series of the same name established by MoMA’s founding education director, Victor D'Amico, in 1942.

In 1979, MoMA re-imagined the Carnival as a free outreach program under the leadership of Betty Blayton-Taylor (1937–2016), an artist (known as Betty Blayton), educator, community activist, and co-founder of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

The conversation began with the Children’s Art Carnival’s origins, its central role in supporting the art of Black and diverse contemporary artists, and Betty Blayton-Taylor’s leadership in creating a dynamic teaching environment and pedagogical model for community-based arts education.

The 125-seat Celeste Bartos Theater at MoMA was filled to capacity for the Friday evening event.

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Prior to becoming one of the most revered and celebrated artists in history, Basquiat was an intern at the Carnival. Dur...
08/26/2026

Prior to becoming one of the most revered and celebrated artists in history, Basquiat was an intern at the Carnival. During his mid-teens, Jean-Michel Basquiat along with Armando Alleyne—both students at the alternative high school, City-As-School—interned in Michael A. Cummings’s classroom where they assisted in teaching drawing, collage, and painting to both disabled and non-disabled students.

In between his internship duties, Basquiat was given opportunities at the Carnival to explore his own artistic interests, one of many contributing factors to his evolving aesthetic and emergence on the Downtown art scene. The Carnival’s executive director, Blayton-Taylor, noted, “He was doing silkscreen prints at the Carnival’s print workshop and he would take those downtown and show them to [Andy] Warhol and some of the other characters that were on the scene…They were intrigued with his imagery, a lot of which I think came from working with the young children…it’s very much into the childish iconography. So he has taken the children’s approach to the image and created a whole new approach to art.”

Created after his brief time at the Carnival, the works on view exemplify some of the influences he may have absorbed there. All three pieces possess the visceral kinetic energy of a child’s drawing, with imprecise lines and shapes, and scribbled handwriting. Untitled (Two Trucks) features Basquiat’s signature crown motif, an emblem with varied meanings such as racial pride, power, and irony. Untitled (heart Henry Geldzahler) is named after the legendary curator and Basquiat supporter. The erratic scrawlings suggest the impulsive nature of children, while the cartoon-like portrait Untitled (Simple Man) draws on children’s sometimes simplified visual language. 

Although Basquait’s time at the Carnival was brief, these works attest to the ways in which underrepresented community organizations and grassroots ecosystems have historically helped shape contemporary artists, despite their roles often being marginalized within mainstream art historical narratives.



“The Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The

robin holder, who was recently interviewed in the “Columbia Neighbors” online publication, the Children’s Art Carnival w...
08/19/2026

robin holder, who was recently interviewed in the “Columbia Neighbors” online publication, the Children’s Art Carnival was a space where deep relationships were forged.

She and fellow teaching artist Steve Mayo met there, and became life partners from 1985 until his passing in 2021.

holder began her "Warrior Women Wizards: Mystical Magical Mysteries" (1985–2006) series while teaching at the Carnival and engaging in, “...many long conversations about spirituality and metaphysics,” with Carnival executive director Betty Blayton-Taylor.

After being hired in 1978, holder spent 10 years as an instructor at the Carnival, where she “saw arts education as an avenue to address societal issues by motivating her students to harness their imaginations, consider possibilities, build skills, and think critically,” according to Brandee Sanders, author of the profile at Columbia Neighbors.

Artwork Image:

robin holder, “Discovery”, 1986. Linoleum print with stencils, 17 × 22 in.

Congratulations to Janet Olivia Henry, who has just been named a 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow. Mitchell Fellows receive $60...
08/13/2026

Congratulations to Janet Olivia Henry, who has just been named a 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow. Mitchell Fellows receive $60,000 in funding, distributed over five years and supplemented by additional career development opportunities.

The Joan Mitchell Foundation fellowships "recognize artistic excellence and elevate a wide range of visual artists and practices," and seek "to actively expand the visual arts to better reflect the diverse world in which we live."

Janet Oliva Henry has three works currently on view in the Wallach Art Gallery exhibition "Children's Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists" through September 13, 2026.

"Untitled," 1971. Soft ground etching, 24 in x 18 in Courtesy of the artist and Gordon Robichaux, New York and STARS, Los Angeles

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615 West 129th Street
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Friday 12pm - 6pm
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