Christiana Cook
Collaboration Play Education Joy
Installation Encompass creation World
You walk into a room with blacked out windows. Mysterious cloth ghosts hang in midair. Black and white illustrations of wraiths and apparitions dangle from a web of clothesline overhead. Posters line the walls showing the dubious outlines of unlikely fantasms. Weird sculptural elements–including Billy, a see through plastic wrap and packaging tape figure, and a
refrigerator filled with haunted foods–line the walls. Perhaps most peculiar are six extremely colorful and strange creatures–most of them floating in midair.
Encompass student installation in progress. Echoes of the Past, 2025.
You have found yourself in this year’s installation as part of Harwood Art Center’s Encompass exhibition. “Echoes of the Past” is an art show conceptualized by Jr. High and filled to the brim with art created by Jr. High and Elementary students. For the past 11 years I’ve helped to facilitate these shows, and for the last decade I’ve helped guide the oldest group of students at Escuela has been tapped as dreamers to develop, conceptualize and install the show.
We’ve worked inside of giant trees, delved into doomed love stories (bridging dystopian futuristic industrial cities and inescapable soft bubble worlds), played in all bunny punk rock bands, created new mythologies and astrologies ruled over by a three headed goddess (Stella) and her dark shadow (Stoil), hosted peaceful alien invasions, built a couch out of mushrooms, invited rat, Doctor Dalyoncar, to perform dream experiments on the unsuspecting public and much more—and this year on the hundredth anniversary of the Harwood building we celebrated ghosts.
Images from past student led Encompass installations.
“Ghosts” was the idea that lit the Jr. High’s creative fire. Trying not to just make a haunted house took some effort, and I worked with the Jr. High to suss out how ghosts could be memories, histories, and stories. In Junior Elementary, we had already been making surrealistic Alebrijes (bright creatures dreamed up by Mexican artist Pedro Linares composed of many intersecting
animal parts). Could we allow these creatures to turn into story-filled spirits for Encompass? Yes, yes we could. While the Jr. High students pursued their interest in creating pencil and ink illustrations of character ghosts—some of whom would be turned into large printed images incollaboration with local printmaker Juliana Kirwin–the already colorful three-dimensional
creatures in Junior. Elementary art classes began to gain their own histories.
Ghost Character prints.
As we started talking about the history of our building, one of our 6th year students did some reading and learned that an art heist had taken place at the Harwood building many years ago. We later learned that this had in fact happened at the Harwood Museum in Taos – but by that time, the story had already sparked a backstory with one of the Junior El art groups. They’d
decided that their Alebrije/Spirit/Creature was in fact an art thief himself. Soon Emanemanel the Weirdo, as he came be called, was imagined fluttering around the Harwood building with his butterfly wings stealing art from the studio artists, the galleries, and even the children in the art room.
Emanemanel the Weirdo floating in the gallery.
On his right wrist hangs a basket of stolen goods.
Other groups tried to make their creatures a bit more kind. Colorful Thing not only brought all color to the world, but he also helps people find missing items (in exchange for offerings of colorful dollar bills). Banana Bob Jr.
– accompanied by his Fruit Spider friends—shoots arrows of love at unsuspecting folks inhabiting the building (his mythology may have started around Valentine’s day–I’ll never tell). Valentine the sky turtle (a different creature–named on the same holiday) uses his powers to herd clouds and grow more plants.
Banana Bob Jr., Colorful thing, and Valentine
To prepare for their contribution to Encompass Senior Elementary learned about Yokai (Japanese ghosts/spirits/demons/creatures) and then started working on their own haunted ideas. Another 6th year student experimented with me, draping a crocheted doily over a balloon after dipping it in glue water. The results were astounding. We brought the process to the rest of the class which resulted in a number of uncanny cloth spooks buoyed in the gallery space!
4th graders wrapped a series of classmates in plastic wrap and packaging tape to design their ghost–Billy–being careful not to wrap more than one limb at a time, and never a face (we used a balloon for the head). Another 4th year designed a haunted model of the Harwood while two 6th years collaborated on a refrigerator full of haunted food. Senior El students
also contributed to many illustrations of transient apparitions above the crowd.
