{"id":103346,"date":"2025-07-07T15:00:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T15:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&p=103346"},"modified":"2025-07-04T12:56:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T12:56:21","slug":"the-watermill-center-summer-gala-grazia-usa-hamptons-gazette","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/the-watermill-center-summer-gala-grazia-usa-hamptons-gazette\/","title":{"rendered":"Scribble at the Watermill Center"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Scribble’s Saturday festival features performances and installations. Photo Credit: Courtesy the Watermill Center<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Picasso famously said, \u201cEvery child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.\u201d 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<\/a> as the theme for his East End arts organization\u2019s upcoming summer gala weekend honoring actress Isabella Rossellini and architect Francis K\u00e9r\u00e9. \u201cThe scribble is profoundly important,\u201d 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 \u201cthe unruly merry markings of the jot, drip, and pool\u2014the Smear, the Streak, the Smudge, the Splotch, the Squiggle, the Scrawl, and the Spill.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s dinner, followed by a Saturday festival with performances and installations spread across the Watermill Center\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Artwork by an unknown child artist. Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection and Golden Gate Kindergarten Association<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The benefit will also spotlight the Watermill Center\u2019s summer exhibition, <\/span>Upside Down Zebra<\/a>, <\/span><\/i>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\u2019s 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 \u201cSunrise. East\u201d and \u201cAbetare,\u201d a collection of Petrit Halilaj\u2019s whimsical steel sculptures based on desk graffiti by Kosovar schoolchildren.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u201cHer research illuminated universal patterns in early artistic development, revealing the fundamental role of visual language in human cognition,\u201d explains Wilson. \u201cThe 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\u2019s art. For Kellogg, the scribble was valid and complete on its own, representing a pure form of creative exploration. I share that view.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Eddie Martinez, HW #70,<\/em> 2025. Photo Credit: Courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scribbling has long been at the core of Wilson\u2019s own artistic practice. \u201cWhen I first had my loft in the early \u201960s 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,\u201d Wilson recalls. \u201cIt was like dancing. This is where I gained confidence in my body and gestures.\u201d At 83, not much has changed, though he\u2019s gamely trying new mediums such as the fashion show he recently staged for Dior, a Fall 2025 <\/span>Orlando<\/span><\/i><\/a>-themed spectacular that featured icebergs, falling rocks, and a soaring albatross. \u201cDirecting for the theater or a fashion show is the same process; it\u2019s no different than designing a dress, or a chair, or a building,\u201d says Wilson. \u201cA 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\u2013and one makes decisions accordingly.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Read GRAZIA USA\u2019<\/em>s Hamptons Gazette<\/a>:<\/strong><\/h4>\n