Craft Around the Country

A New York City Exhibition Puts Creative Exchange on Display

The artists in Children’s Art Carnival: The Making of Contemporary Artists at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in Manhattan reflect on lessons learned from the children and other artists who participated in the program over the past six decades.

By Kate Schuler
September 1, 2026

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Photo by Olympia Shannon, courtesy of Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University

Installation view of Children's Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists, featuring Emmett Wigglesworth’s It is Not Enough to See, One Must See Through to Find Truth, 2013, acrylic on styrofoam board, approximately 72 x 48 x 2 in. each.

While teaching at the Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem in the mid-1970s, New York City textile artist (and 2024 American Craft Council Fellow) Michael A. Cummings saw how his young students approached art instinctively and without constraint, layering fabric scraps, buttons, and feathers into colorful collages. “It allowed me to think, ‘Michael, you have to let go of this book learning and just be a free spirit like the students,’” recalls Cummings, who had just started working with fabric at the time. “Through the Carnival I got comfortable and familiar with the possibilities of not only fabric, but embellishments and surface treatments,” he says.

He shifted his own practice to collage-inspired quilts adorned with embroidery, found objects, and other embellishments—work that established him as a leading innovator in textile art.

Cummings’s quilts are among the artworks featured in Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in Manhattan through September 13. Tracing the program’s impact on those who passed through its doors, the show puts archival material alongside work by 25 contemporary artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Senga Nengudi, Dindga McCannon, and Tschabalala Self.

Photo by Olympia Shannon, courtesy of Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University

LEFT TO RIGHT: Michael A. Cummings’s quilts Flower Still Life (1976), Pathway to Eternity (1977), and Sana Goes to Japan (1979), all installed as a part of Children's Art Carnival in Harlem.

The Carnival began as an annual Museum of Modern Art event in 1942 and was reestablished in Harlem, one of the nerve centers of Black life and art in New York City, in 1969 as a youth arts program under artist Betty Blayton. Staffing its classrooms with working artists, the program gave students latitude to experiment with a variety of art materials.

“For Betty, it wasn’t really about creating artists,” says exhibition curator Souleo. “It was about creating human beings who would go out into the world, and no matter what they pursued, would make the world better.”

For ceramic artist and activist Sana Musasama, the Carnival’s influence runs through many aspects of her life and work. “The experiences with the children go beyond just inspiring your art. It inspires your life and your direction, and you take it into many areas of your journey as a teacher, as a mentor, as a traveler, as an activist,” she says. Her tactile, purpose-driven approach is on display in I See Me Dolls (I-V), a recent mixed-media and ceramic series celebrating Black identity.

Cummings’s 1979 quilt Sana Goes to Japan, modeled on Musasama and incorporating mixed-media elements he first discovered with the students, captures the friendships and creative exchange among the teaching artists, speaking directly to the exhibition’s larger theme: how the Carnival shaped the artists who learned, taught, and grew within its brownstone walls.

Photo by Olympia Shannon, courtesy of Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University

Tomo Mori, Eve—Mother of Collaboration, 2026, community-sourced fabrics and wire, 102 x 72 x 36 in.

Photo by Olympia Shannon, courtesy of Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University

Installation view of Children's Art Carnival in Harlem: The Making of Contemporary Artists, with Dominican American artist Milagros Batista’s Sikolo the Beautiful on the left, 2023, mixed media, hand-crocheted floral motifs, and embroidery on an upcycled coat, 40 x 20 x 10 in.

Kate Schuler is a writer, potter, and editor based in Washington, DC.

Learn more about Children's Art Carnival: The Making of Contemporary Artists online.

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This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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