Cycling, plates spinning on sticks and bicycles floating in midair all have one thing in common: balance.
The Fowler Museum’s “Up in the Air” event features the “World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou” and “Round Trip: Bicycling Asia Minor, 1891” exhibitions as well as an interactive performance by juggler John Whitfield on Sunday at 1 p.m.
Fowler Museum Education Manager Corrie Siegel said “Up in the Air” is the latest addition to Fowler’s Family Jam series, which is geared toward families, but open to all, including UCLA students. With its focus on balance in terms of bike riding, balancing objects and juggling, “Up in the Air” offers a new perspective on two of Fowler’s current exhibitions to this series, which, in the past, has featured Hawaiian dance performances, magicians and Nigerian drumming.
Cameroonian-born and Belgium-based artist Pascale Marthine Tayou played on this idea of balance in “World Share.” In parts of his exhibit, pots and pans reach toward the ceiling in towering stacks.
“(‘World Share’) is a very playful exhibition that uses many different types of materials that you might not normally think about (having) in a museum,” Siegel said. “(Tayou) uses straws, barbed wire and crumpled up pieces of paper.”
Fowler Director of Education and Curatorial Affairs Betsy Quick said other installations featured in Tayou’s exhibition include sculptures, drawings and videos as well as Tayou’s bicycles, or “Bendskins,” which are precariously loaded with hanging objects instead of passengers.
“Round Trip” tells the story of two young American travelers, William Sachtleben and Thomas Allen, Jr., who journeyed through Asia Minor on bicycles in 1891. Quick said the exhibition features reprints of the 43 black-and-white photographs taken by the two cyclists in the original circular shape produced by the box camera they used.
“You certainly have a sense of this amazing journey and exploration that these gentlemen undertook and what an accomplishment it was for them,” Quick said. “In many places they went, the bicycle had never been seen before; it was an all-new invention.”
Quick said the Fowler Museum worked with UCLA Library Special Collections, which holds the original prints, to create the “Round Trip” exhibition. This allowed them access to paper sleeves that held the two men’s comments about each place captured in their images. These comments were then used in the captions that supplement the images in the exhibition.
There will be a performance that includes audience participation during the “Up in the Air” event. Siegel said she and Quick decided to include juggling in order to physically involve event attendees.
“We thought it would be great to have a juggler come to Fowler and share firsthand ideas about balance and keeping things suspended in the air,” Siegel said.
The performer for the event, Whitfield, said his interest in juggling began when he watched a man juggle three items in a children’s hospital. With his curiosity piqued, Whitfield purchased “Juggling for the Complete Klutz” and 10 days later had successfully taught himself how to juggle the three beanbags that came with the book. A juggling instructor since 1983, Whitfield said he can teach anyone how to juggle in a fraction of the time it took him to first learn.
For “Up in the Air,” Whitfield said his performance will give the audience the chance to work with juggling sticks, spinning plates, Chinese yo-yos and juggling scarves. While the interactive opportunity with audience members depends on the age of members, Whitfield said there will be ways everyone can get involved.
“(The performance) will give (event attendees) the opportunity to try something that they may have wanted to do for a long time, but never had the chance to, and it’s family oriented,” Whitfield said.
After the “Up in the Air” event, there will also be a talk in the Lenart Auditorium by historian David Herlihy on the “Round Trip” exhibit, for those who wish to know more about the two cyclists’ travels.
“(‘Up in the Air’) is really a celebration of the opening of the ‘Round Trip’ show,” Quick said. “But I think the afternoon, from the family program to the public lecture, is really a way to engage a very wide public in discovering these two exhibitions and also thinking about, in a kind of physical way, the notion of balance.”