Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Renowned theater director and Watermill Center founder Robert Wilson may just have found a solution. Taking a cue from the wonderfully inventive way children put crayon to paper, he chose Scribble as the theme for his East End arts organization’s upcoming summer gala weekend honoring actress Isabella Rossellini and architect Francis Kéré. “The scribble is profoundly important,” says Wilson. The Dr. Seuss-worthy invite for the two-night engagement, July 25 and 26, offers creative licence to indulge your inner child artist and revel in “the unruly merry markings of the jot, drip, and pool—the Smear, the Streak, the Smudge, the Splotch, the Squiggle, the Scrawl, and the Spill.”
Ludic and broadly interdisciplinary in scope, Scribble promises to take art out of the black box theater and white box gallery. Presented by Van Cleef & Arpels, the program features a Friday plein air artist’s dinner, followed by a Saturday festival with performances and installations spread across the Watermill Center’s 10-acre wooded campus, including 22 works created by artists-in-residence during a monthlong International Summer Program. These include a site-specific installation by Argentine visual artist and set designer Endi Ruiz that transforms trees into natural loudspeakers, a movement piece by Greek dancer and choreographer Christiana Kosiari based on ChatGPT prompts, and a soundscape by South African composer Thuthuka Sibisi that involves buried Zulu bowls. Chef Jeremiah Stone, co-founder of city hotspots Contra and Wildair, will provide culinary direction for both evenings.
The benefit will also spotlight the Watermill Center’s summer exhibition, Upside Down Zebra, which examines the artistic value of youthful imagination by placing 400 drawings and paintings from the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection in conversation with works by 40 contemporary artists, including Eddie Martinez, Josh Smith, and Carroll Dunham. Co-curated by Brian Belott and Noah Khoshbin, the exhibition is the largest the Watermill Center has ever mounted on its campus. In fact, it’s so big that it fills all six of the galleries and extends to the grounds, where two monumental works will greet party goers: a group of 12 elongated aluminum heads by Ugo Rondinone named “Sunrise. East” and “Abetare,” a collection of Petrit Halilaj’s whimsical steel sculptures based on desk graffiti by Kosovar schoolchildren.
The name Scribble was inspired by the work of Rhoda Kellogg, a 20th-century early childhood scholar who amassed more than 2 million drawings created by pint-size Picassos aged two to eight from over 30 countries. “Her research illuminated universal patterns in early artistic development, revealing the fundamental role of visual language in human cognition,” explains Wilson. “The scribble was the entry point into visual communication, akin to babbling in language. She challenged the adult or academic tendency to look for recognizable images or narratives in children’s art. For Kellogg, the scribble was valid and complete on its own, representing a pure form of creative exploration. I share that view.”
Scribbling has long been at the core of Wilson’s own artistic practice. “When I first had my loft in the early ’60s in Lower Manhattan, I had an enormous room, 25 feet wide by 70 feet deep, and I would take rolls of paper and put it on the floor to make large drawings,” Wilson recalls. “It was like dancing. This is where I gained confidence in my body and gestures.” At 83, not much has changed, though he’s gamely trying new mediums such as the fashion show he recently staged for Dior, a Fall 2025 Orlando-themed spectacular that featured icebergs, falling rocks, and a soaring albatross. “Directing for the theater or a fashion show is the same process; it’s no different than designing a dress, or a chair, or a building,” says Wilson. “A new construction of any work is about drawing lines in time and space. There are only two lines: a straight one and a curved one–and one makes decisions accordingly.”
