Spinning Plates: Weekly Book Review
Issue 2, Volume 14
It’s no secret that I love words, and the magic in kid lit often emerges from the liberating experience of unpacking verse written for children. The most recent books I’ve reviewed here - Llama Llama Red Pajama, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, The White Stripes Book, The Bob Marley Book - are, first and foremost, lyrical.
Georgia O’Keeffe Loved the Desert by Kate Coombs and What Colors Do You See? by - *checks notes to be sure I’m getting this right* - Andy Warhol take a different tack. As you may have guessed from the subject matter, these two board books tap into the burgeoning visual interest of little ones, offering them age-appropriate experiences with art.
Kate Coombs’s O’Keeffe book, from BabyLit’s Little Naturalists series, provides a dense sensory experience, juxtaposing simple color words with complex landscape terminology, bouncing from depictions of “yellow cactus blossoms” to “lilies, their petals and their seeds.” The illustrator, Seth Lucas, conquered the unenviable task of creating original art for the book, adopting a palette of muted dessert pastels, capturing O’Keeffe’s artistic process, rather than attempting a toddler-friendly knockoff of her actual work.
The Warhol book does something quite different and also succeeds. Each two-page spread here is dedicated to A) a single color, and B) a piece of art from the “author’s” oeuvre, used as an exemplar of the hue in question.1 There’s the “YELLOW” page, featuring Warhol’s ubiquitous banana pop print, not to mention a pink lithographed cow from the poster for the 1976 Venice Biennale. Despite the haute arte source material, What Colors Do You See? not only has the capacity to hold a toddler’s attention over and over again, but also offers an approach to learning colors that’s just a touch more hipster-ish than those painted Montessori blocks you’re tripping over on the way to the kitchen.
Of course, that’s not MY thing, but I KNOW SOME people for whom it is a thing. (*wink emoji*)
Performative hipster parenting aside, finding accessible ways for Azad to experience art has been one of the great joys of early parenting for me. We bought the Warhol book during a delightful trip to the 2022 Whitney Biennial, captured above, when my little nugget was just under a year old. The staff there, and at many other NYC cultural institutions, have been gracious in allowing her to crawl, then eventually walk, the galleries at her own pace … with the notable exception of that one time she tried to climb the scaffolding of an immersive video installation. That was an embarrassing afternoon for dad.
Azad turns two tomorrow, and while her preferences have shifted, she still prefers playing with the HVAC grates near the Whitney gallery windows to the actual art itself. My great hope is that her taste improves, at least somewhat, over time.
But maybe she’ll end up hating institutional art, and that’s okay too. At least she knows now that bananas are yellow.
Thanks a lot, Andy Warhol.