Keeping busy during WFH time: Museum of Modern Art and Louise Lawler offer a coloring book.

Working from home (WFH) is challenging for all of us. Here’s a great resource for you and your children—if you have your Crayons ready.

Artist Louise Lawler is—without question—not on most lists of artists who would create a project like a family-friendly coloring book.

Lawler’s work usually considers heavy concepts related to authorship, ownership, and appropriation. And, that’s the kind of stuff unlikely to please your wee ones—more likely to put them to sleep—if taken at face value. However, her new coloring book is better than any other like it that I’ve seen. Try having your kids—or you with them—color in images based on Lawler’s pictures of Jeff Koons sculptures reflected in each other, and the like?

None of the coloring pages could be considered simple, a few are terribly complex, and all create teaching moments. (You’ll find more on that via the links below.)

Writing for MOMA, Roxana Marcoci writes that Louise Lawler’s work looks at the lives of artworks in museums, private collections, gallery backrooms, storage spaces, and auction houses, examining how meaning changes with different types of displays. She continuously re-presents, reframes, or restages her works, and revisits her own pictures by transferring them to different formats, making her photographs into paperweights, tracing drawings, and works she calls “adjusted to fit” (images stretched or expanded to fit where they are displayed).

Marcoci continues, “The tracings are black-and-white line versions of her photographs of places where art is shown and experienced. To produce them, Lawler worked with artist and children’s book illustrator Jon Buller. A selection was shown in large-scale versions at MoMA in her 2017 exhibition WHY PICTURES NOW, which I curated with Kelly Sidley.”

Here’s the link to MOMA and to the coloring book: Louise Lawler art coloring book with MOMA.

Feel free to share with others. And, don’t forget to sharpen your crayons.