How the Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem Nurtured Generations
Nearly six decades since its founding, the legacy of the beloved program is explored in an exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery.
In March 1969, at the first-ever Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem, artist, activist, and educator Betty Blayton-Taylor looked on as groups of children painted at easels and strung objects together to make hanging sculptures. Held in a garage provided by the Harlem School of the Arts, the event engaged artists to conduct workshops for local kids. “Children can just as well use their energy to be creative as destructive,” Blayton-Taylor told the New York Times in a 1969 interview. “They’re having fun and that’s what we want.”
Nearly six decades later, the legacy forged by Blayton-Taylor as the carnival’s co-founder and executive director is now on view in an exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery. Organized by independent curator Souleo, Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists doubles as the fourth edition of the Uptown Triennial, which showcases the work of artists from Harlem, El Barrio, Washington Heights, and other Upper Manhattan neighborhoods.
Blayton-Taylor’s brother, Oscar Blayton, first suggested the idea for an exhibition about the carnival to Souleo in 2023. “Betty [Blayton-Taylor] always wanted the art educators and the art students that did well to get recognition,” Blayton said to Hyperallergic.
While Souleo was already familiar with Blayton-Taylor’s work and had even curated a show of her art in 2017, he said that he developed a much deeper appreciation for the carnival while conducting research and interviewing artists for the current exhibition. In addition to recounting the carnival’s history, the curator wanted to foreground its impact on generations of artists who participated as instructors, students, or staff.
The exhibition is anchored around the idea that art can nurture a child's creativity, and that the teaching artist, in turn, can benefit from engaging with a child’s imagination. On opening night, Donna M. Jones, co-chair of the carnival’s board of trustees, said that whenever children came to the carnival, “they were met with love, they were provided with snacks, and they were told that ‘you matter.’”
