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Project Dada community art show takes shape
| Friday, May 16 2008 4:33 PM
Last Updated: Monday, May 19 2008 8:53 AM
Beckie Pate has a problem: “As I get older my hair is falling out,” the 52-year-old said. “Every morning when I take a shower and I wash my hair, I have this handful of hair and I throw it up against the wall.”
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• What: Project Dada community art show
• When: From Thursday (special reception at 6 p.m.) through Aug. 28, to coincide with the Bakersfield Visual Art Festival 2008: Fragments.
• Where: Bakersfield Museum of Art, 1930 R St.
• Information: www.bmoa.org or 323-7219.
ADMISSION:
• Thursday reception: Free to members, $10 to nonmembers.
• Other times: Regular/senior 65 and older/student/member admission rates — $5/$4/$2/free, respectively — apply.
• From noon to 4 p.m. on June 1: Free Dada Day for all
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Well, what better way to deal with a bad hair day than to make art with your wayward locks?
“This is a way to immortalize my hair,” Pate said.
As of Thursday, Pate’s hair — as well as the works of hundreds of other amateur and experienced artists from the community — will be on display at the Bakersfield Museum of Art as part of Project Dada through Aug. 28.
In March, the museum and The Californian invited local residents, regardless of age or artistic skill, to participate in a community art project. The endeavor was named “Project Dada” after an early-20th-century artistic movement that welcomed spontaneity, whimsy, nonsense and experimentation using various media: paint, fabric, photographs, collage — even hair!
Hundreds of submissions were received, many of them from children and schools, said Beth Pandol, the museum’s director of marketing. The pieces were either drawn, painted or mounted on blank cards that had been distributed inside the March 9 edition of The Californian.
Each piece was meant to be a part of a body — head, torso or legs — but they did not have to represent the human form.
In fact, Pate’s clump of hair is the torso on a Dada whose behatted cartoon bull’s head and scrawny stick legs were created by other artists.
“What I really like is the randomness of this project,” said Pandol, whose own robotic Dada torso, made of cut-up CD-ROM discs, got matched with Dadas of a girl’s head and a man’s legs. “People just really were creative,” she said, “and they thought of a lot of different things and it’s so fun to see how they all go together. None of them match up but they look wonderful together.
“And I’m really happy that we’ve had the whole community get really involved in this. That’s really wonderful for us because that’s why we’re in existence here at the museum of art — it’s to have the community get engaged in the arts.”