School portraits / A third-grade art lesson · February 2024
Pancakes in the Skyspace
Friends Seminary has a James Turrell. A third grader has an answer.
A parent at Friends Seminary in Manhattan, sending a third grader up to the school's James Turrell Skyspace on the sixth floor, might reasonably prepare a dinner question. This is the sort of art that gets called perception-altering, a word a parent needs to handle carefully. Too impressed and you sound as though you've memorized the brochure. Too casual and you've wasted a Turrell on 'fine.' You would probably settle on something warm about how the light made them feel, then brace, pleasantly, for a reply just slightly beyond your reach.
When reporter Hilarie M. Sheets watched teacher Andrea Aimi bring a class of third graders up with sketchbooks in February 2024, everything was proceeding as a parent might hope. The dome was closed for the daytime session, but the lights moved through the spectrum, colors shifting overhead. Aimi told the children to find the color that resonated and draw a real object the same color before the light changed.
Many of the drawings came back as food. A snap pea for green. A grapefruit for the reddish pink. Butter and pancakes for yellow. Yellow got giggles. Aimi suggested the class might be thinking about lunch and brought them back to class.
Back at our imagined dinner, the question lands. The parent had prepared for light and perception, perhaps a thoughtful silence while the child searched for words. The child is not searching for words. The answer, delivered with the confidence of someone who has recently completed a drawing, is pancakes.
There is a small, dignified pause on the parent's side of the table. It passes. The child followed every step of the assignment — found a color, matched it to something real, drew it before the light changed — and the real thing was breakfast. The parent, one imagines, puts the careful question aside, asks what kind of syrup, and gets a much longer answer.