A psychoanalytic preoccupation with childhood and its traumas runs through an exhibition that attends to the “forms of violence—both real and symbolic—that are intrinsic to the process of being educated.” Heading through Ghislaine Leung’s baby gates (Gates, 2019) to enter this three-room show featuring works by thirty-five artists, the visitor encounters a life-size turquoise Cookie Monster with eyeballs askew and mouth wide. Stefan Tcherepnin’s Cadisyphos with Baggages (2019) is pulling a cardboard yellow school bus behind it, as if to satirize the futile horror of early schooling. The absurdity is amplified in Course Casualty (2019), another faux-fur monster laid flat on a patch of red carpet in front of a CRT TV, in the manner of a crime scene. The tone is set.
On a pixelating screen nearby, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s 1987 video work Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup stages a nauseating reenactment of parental abuse through a cycle of feeding and punishment involving a bowl of blended pulps. Artist and activist Michela Griffo’s discreet, cartoon-style paintings, meanwhile, further advance the idea that violence is latent in childhood development. Closer inspection reveals that Griffo’s text bubbles contain accounts of abuse, some of them autobiographical, others from testimony of people who experienced abuse at boarding school or church.
As Griffo deconstructs childhood abuse through iconographic ruptures and intimations of lived experiences, Kelley and McCarthy’s exaggerated performance of the abused child and the violent father walks a line between abreaction and mockery. In both cases, violence seems to be the object lesson, which the passive victims of these horrifying situations must learn. If Griffo’s political work gives voice to silenced histories of abuse, the disquieting videos only add to the prevailing atmosphere of futility and malice.
Kelley’s wails rebound off the colorful, hand-painted wallpapers by Philip Wiegard. With the paid help of children at the local Lyons Community School, Lost Boys (2025) is a collaborative work that forms a spectacular container—part barbed wire fence, part safety net—around the exhibition. In the foyer facing 932 Grand Street, Carissa Rodriguez’s minimalist wooden cubbies (Untitled (storage cubbies), 2024/25), modeled after those found in Montessori schools, are intended for use by visitors. Hanging from the ceiling is a digital panel displaying a list of words learned by Rodriguez’s toddler, which the artist updates whenever new vocabulary is acquired.
The reiteration of the conditions of infancy and adolescence across this show can at times feel patronizing, even infantilizing—especially when the visitor must pass through Leung’s readymade child safety gates at the threshold to each space. A set of low, babyproof walls divides one space in the center of another gallery, accented with photos from Marc Kokopeli’s childhood (untitled, 2016–ongoing). In these images, originally taken by his mother and used as educational tools, the artist poses with his sister and friends. In the same room, Kasia Fudakowski’s brass plaques detail Reasons to Reproduce, Reasons Not to Reproduce (2023), performing the artist’s indecision about whether or not to have children. In Tetsuya Ishida’s untitled surrealist painting (2003), a depressed-looking adult waits in the road with an empty gaze, as a school of small fish funnel in to a fish tank-turned-bus in which a predatory fish is lurking.
If this exhibition’s sustained critique of pedagogy can itself feel a little didactic, there are exceptions. Sable Elyse Smith's “Coloring Book” paintings highlight the insidious forms of discrimination and othering concealed in state-issued coloring books for children in prison visitation centers, while sgp repurposes found school chairs made with prison labor into unstable structures that embody disjuncture and inequity. Other artists propose alternative models for teaching and learning as reciprocal exchange rather than expression of power. Jef Geys’s Gelijkheid, Brüderlichkeit, Liberté (Equality, Fraternity, Liberty, 1986), in which the Enlightenment motto is inscribed on a closed door, is a powerful comment on the false promise of education to overcome disadvantages of class and gender. An archival vitrine chronicles Bruce High Quality Foundation University: a traveling school, founded in 2009, that visited institutions and public spaces in the United States to offer free access to alternative education. Even Philip Wiegard’s collaborative polymer clay paintings, products of horizontal teaching and learning online, present an accessible and equitable model of education and authorship.
By foregrounding violence, trauma, and futility, “On Education” interrogates the function of educational institutions as regulatory forces that shape behaviour from the early developmental stages to produce compliant citizens. In this at-times bleak vision, our educational system serves only to promote orthodoxy and conformity under the guise of protection. Yet the best works in the show offer reminders that schools can also be sites for discomfort, dissonance, cross-generational alliance, worldbuilding, rupture, and resistance. Much depends on which of these visions wins out.
