The Shelburne Museum Presents a Show of Toys Designed to Empower Kids’ Imaginations

Toys by Karen Hewitt Credit: Courtesy of Daria Bishop

Whether Shelburne Museum visitors have children in tow or just feel like a kid, they may want to head to the back of the exhibition “Object/s of Play: The Work of Cas Holman and Karen Hewitt.” There, on two large turf mats, they can use black plastic wing nut screws and bolts to connect large plywood planks, disks and other shapes into whatever constructions come to mind. Or they can raid a floor tray filled with brilliantly hued wooden rectangles and link them into squares or towers.

A few directives and sketches are stenciled on the walls, but their gist is nondirectional: “Build a way to sleep in a cloud.” “Make a friend.”

Such open-ended play is the mission of Holman and Hewitt, designers and friends a generation apart who believe in providing children with the means to create their own imaginative play. The point, Burlington-based Hewitt said by phone, is that “You’re in the moment, not thinking about who it’s for or what it’s going to be.”

Holman added, also by phone, that her instruction-free toys allow children to design their own goals. “It doesn’t even matter what the outcome is because, through trial and error, [children] learn how to figure something out rather than learning that they can be an assembly-line robot,” she said.

New York City-based Holman enlisted Hewitt’s participation in the show, and their pairing makes for an interesting contrast.

Holman grew up running through nature in northern California, built sets and costumes as a drag performer after college, and earned a master’s degree in industrial design; she recently ended a 10-year run teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2019, Holman was featured in an episode of the Netflix series “Abstract: The Art of Design.”

“Are they toys? Learning things? Art? … The labels don’t particularly matter to me.” Karen Hewitt

Hewitt grew up in Manhattan, earned a bachelor’s in studio art and became a practicing artist before earning a master’s in early childhood education and teaching young children for a decade. After seeing a London museum exhibition catalog of historical and artist-designed toys, she melded her two areas of expertise to create her own.

Both women ran, or run, their own businesses. “When I met Karen, we both needed marketing and sales,” Holman recalled. Hewitt founded Learning Materials Workshop in 1979 and ran it with help from a few employees and interns until 2015. She designed exhibition-related toys for sale at museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and her work was included in a 2012 group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called “MoMA Studio: Common Senses.” The Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal has one of every toy she has designed.

Holman founded Heroes Will Rise in 2006 with the launch of her first toy product, Geemo — flexible, white, branching objects like rubbery bones that connect via magnets at their ends. Her toys are in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The two designers became friends while attending an annual mainstream education fair — where, Holman said, “we were outliers.” Museum curators Kory Rogers and Carolyn Bauer gave them free rein to curate the show, which has three distinct parts.

The designers start with their predecessors: a set of vitrines holding historical toys from the museum’s extensive collection. A toy historian, Hewitt plumbed the Shelburne’s archive while coauthoring Educational Toys in America: 1800 to the Present (1979) and Toying With Architecture: The Building Toy in the Arena of Play, 1800 to the Present (1997).

She and Holman spotted the concept of open play in a 1919 Erector set and in architectural building blocks from 1874. Erector sets were marketed to boys, but the designer-curators found late 19th-century building blocks by Samuel L. Hill with packaging that portrays both girls and boys. Early alphabet blocks dating from the 1850s through the 1870s feature rich story illustrations that can be rearranged to tell a story the child devises.

The second part of the exhibition is a retrospective of Hewitt’s work — her first — and, though dense, it could have contained much more. The artist’s business website archives nearly 50 toys she designed over 50 years. Holman and Byron O’Neill, a designer and creative director at the Burlington firm Solidarity of Unbridled Labour, with whom Hewitt is creating a new toy called Girondo, helped her pare down the array.

Arcobaleno (Italian for rainbow) is a fitted set of slanted arches in rainbow colors that my 16-year-old son remembers playing with. Hewitt designed the Color and Form Blocks, a set of nine cubic, triangular and columnar wooden blocks painted in red, yellow and blue, to be sold during MoMA’s 2009 exhibition “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity.”

The cubic blocks of Prismatic are half colorfully painted wood, half clear acrylic that catches the light. Wood bobbins, rubber bands, dowels and a base make up the endlessly reconfigurable Thingamabobbin, one of Hewitt’s first toys. It was painted red, white and blue for the U.S. bicentennial and paraded in St. Louis, Mo., for the occasion.

Exhibition preparator Giancarlo Filippi helped install the toys in beautifully arranged groups of four or five per display case. “It looks a little pristine,” Hewitt commented wryly. “I would have liked it a little more knocked down.” A low play table stocked with duplicates in the middle of the floor helps counter the hands-off message.

Hewitt calls her creations “border crossing.” “Are they toys? Learning things? Art? Multiples? Whatever you want to call it — the labels don’t particularly matter to me,” she said.

O’Neill, who has worked with Hewitt on designs since 2015, called her “restless in her own design process. She is just constantly interested in playing and not overthinking and just allowing materials and forms to clash in unexpected ways.” Currently, he said, they are considering outfitting the carousel-like Girondo, a prototype of which is on display, with patterns and shapes echoing Shelburne Museum’s life-size carousel.

“Karen has such a breadth and depth of knowledge about how people interact with play objects,” O’Neill noted.

Holman’s side of the exhibition, the third section, is quite different. Largely taken up by play spaces for Rigamajig, the plank-and-wing nut building set, it also contains her sketches, notes and prototype parts for the set along with models of her newest idea, the Critter, inspired by an antique sawhorse. (One model still bears a sticky note on which she wrote, “Be gentle — these are going in a museum & I’m not joking.”)

Rigamajig is deliberately made to encourage social interaction: Some of its plywood pieces are too large for one child to lift and manipulate. Holman chose black as the color of the wing nuts and bolts so that kids approach them not as toys but as building materials. Both aspects affect children’s self-esteem, she pointed out.

“That sense that I can be trusted with this [brings] a huge sense of agency. They’re being seen as competent and can make giant things without instructions. It’s empowering,” Holman said.

She does hear skepticism from parents and educators who wonder if it’s wise to give children something that might pinch their fingers or fall on them — or ask whether it’s worthwhile to give them something on which they can’t be tested. “They don’t understand the learning value,” Holman said. “I pick my battles now.”

Each day, museum employees and volunteers dismantle visitors’ Rigamajig creations to give others a fresh start. After deconstruction sessions were combined with weekly staff meetings, employees began “lining up for this,” Rogers said with a laugh.

The most intricate thing they’ve had to deconstruct? A go-cart. The child who built it had figured out how to design it so that his feet could turn the front wheels.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Play’s the Thing | The Shelburne Museum presents a show of toys designed to empower kids’ imaginations”