Color, Cut, Collage

We wanted visitors to feel as though they were stepping into Matisse’s art studio and to empower them to make art from the felt sense of how they feel, not necessarily what they see. Bad Art Club is centered around permission and accessibility, so we designed the activation to be welcoming to people of all ages, cultures, backgrounds and abilities, with many different ways and levels to engage. We brought in vibrant materials that fell within museum constraints and included written and spatial directives to support visitors in a self-guided experience that still had the potential for transformation woven in.

The intention was to create a space for easeful, joyous, creative collaboration amongst strangers. We also wanted to give people permission to make a mark, cut something up, be messy and emergent, with disregard for the outcome. We built layers to the creative process in order to keep visitors engaged with the process itself, continually letting go of the outcome or desire for their art to be good. Artworks were created, framed and displayed on the museum wall, only to be taken down and cut into a form by another person and added to a growing collective collage, that would also later be destroyed.

We worked closely with Bella to understand the constraints of the space and the other two activations that were to take place at the same time, in order to create a cohesive experience for visitors. We sourced the easels, art materials, and set furniture from our local community, including reclaimed materials from SCRAP, a longstanding San Francisco nonprofit whose mission aligns with our own. SCRAP joined us for the evening with a hat-making workshop. We brought a team of 5, each wearing a Bad Art Club t-shirt, to welcome and engage visitors.

We set up three plein air wooden easels with canvases and pinned swatches of color, texture, and abstract inspiration to each. The easels were equipped with vibrant oil pastels, brushes and gouache. Each featured a unique prompt:

Look in the mirror at the set and paint the energy of the scene

Take in some detail from the set and then close your eyes as you paint it

Use both hands to draw what you see

In the center of the easels, we built a set that featured motifs from Matisse’s paintings: a wooden table, ornate vase with flowers, a guitar (no one ever played it, but it was knocked over again and again), and even Goldfish (the snack, as the museum doesn’t allow live animals inside). Visitors were encouraged to sit at the table and play a game of “Bad Scrabble” together, only adding words not in the Scrabble dictionary to the board, as visitors at the easels looked to them for inspiration.

Upon completing their work of art, visitors were invited to slide it into an ornate golden frame which sat on a museum pedestal and rested against the wall. This provided the special moment of having one’s art framed on the wall of SFMOMA! We captured the joy with a film photo that surprised and delighted visitors in their inboxes a week after the event.

At one point, the frame itself fell over and the glass shattered. Bad Art Club was in the house, and we were keeping it real. Visitors pitched in to help clean up the glass, a round of “oopa!” went up, and the whole room relaxed into a new level of comfort.

Then, visitors surrendered their artworks to be further decorated with pastels and cut into shapes and forms by other visitors. Leaving the space with artwork is prohibited by the museum, which is so aligned with Bad Art Club’s focus on the process, not the outcome. Art was being created and destroyed, turned into something new. These tables were hubs of genuine human interaction, as scissors and glue sticks were passed around, until finally the cut forms were added to a collective mural, growing on the wall.

Our goal was to surprise, delight, and engage museum visitors in a novel creative experience that invited them to break outside of rules and conventions, and connect with Matisse’s spirit in the process. Over a hundred people participated, and twenty-five original artworks were framed, photographed, and emailed to their makers.

One moment captured the spirit of the evening. A young teen watched as his auntie, visiting from the Philippines, made a beautiful painting. When we encouraged him to take a turn adding to it, he said, “Oh no, I’d ruin it.” We replied, “That’s the point! It’s Bad Art Club! Ruin it!” A smile crept over his face as he painted on his auntie’s artwork, and the two of them laughed and bonded over it.

By the end of the activation, people were smiling in photos next to their framed art, connecting with one another as they contributed to the same collage, exchanging phone numbers with new friends, wearing ridiculous hats (courtesy of SCRAP’s hat-making workshop), and filling up a wall of colorful cut forms, as Matisse had done decades before.