Parent life / Parent life · an auction promise
What Kindergarten Art Sells For at a School Auction
At one Manhattan public school's auction, a class shower curtain went for $400 and six crayon drawings beat a backstage pass to the Temptations.
In 2005 PTO Today published a price list from a Saturday night auction in March at P.S. 166, a public elementary school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The parent association raised $50,000 that night, more than $8,000 of it from art made by the children. I have read it several times, the way some people read box scores.
$70. A pre-K step stool, each child's thumbprint turned into an animal by the teacher.
$150. A door mirror ringed with every fourth grader's initial, in painted wooden letters with rhinestones.
$350. A kite, built by a parent from nylon and wood, with a felt symbol from each second grader sewn on. The listing notes that it was meant for display but actually flies.
$400. A clear shower curtain, divided into 24 squares, with a self-portrait in permanent marker from each kindergartner and one square for the class number and the year.
I like to think that somewhere on the Upper West Side, a family showers behind an entire kindergarten class. I hope the class is doing well.
$1,300. A third grade's Andy Warhol-style self-portraits in fluorescent blue and green. One mother, Buffy Perry, already owned her daughter's class piece from an earlier auction, a Statue of Liberty in oranges and reds, and had promised her son she would win this one. After a bidding war with another family, she did. "I couldn't quite believe we spent so much," she told the magazine, but she had promised, "so we had no cap." The two pieces hang opposite each other in her entryway.
$1,540. Six watercolors of the school and the neighborhood by kindergartners, washed over crayon. The magazine notes the artists were not present, being five and in bed. Those six paintings brought in more than two of the night's big-ticket items combined: a wine tasting for 25, and tickets to the Temptations and the Four Tops with backstage passes and a photo with the performers.
We have one piece of auction art in our house. It is a clay platter from the middle one's kindergarten class, with nineteen fingerprints and a dent. My wife bid on it, against nobody, for $85. It hangs in the hall. When guests ask about it, the middle one, now twelve, says he does not know which fingerprint is his.
I know which one is his. It is the one in the dent.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- PTO Today: Auction Gold, Student Art Projects ptotoday.com
- Arbor Heights PTSA: Classroom Art Projects or Baskets arborheightsptsa.org
- ART CAMP: 20 Elementary School Art Auction Ideas artcampla.com