July 19– August 24, 2025
20*20 House Gallery, Lansdowne, PA
Curated for the Lansdowne Economic Development Corporation
Overview
Second Gen brought together professional artists and young people with whom they shared a meaningful relationship. Through a juried open call, artists applied alongside a child, grandchild, neighbor, student, or other young person, proposing to exhibit work together.
The exhibition celebrated creativity as something shared across generations through observation, experimentation, play, mentorship, and care. It also made room for artists to appear with more of their lives intact, acknowledging that caregiving and family relationships are often treated as separate from professional artistic identity.
Together, the project asked: What changes when children are treated not only as the future audience for art, but as artists and participants in cultural life now?
Curatorial Approach
The exhibition developed from watching young visitors move through the galleries and recognizing how much of the work was physically viewable only by adults. In Second Gen, adult artists’ work was installed at conventional gallery height, while every young participant’s work was hung at that individual child’s eye level. We asked how tall each child was and used that information to determine where to place their work.
By changing to accommodate the children, the exhibition’s technical structure became visible. Children could encounter art at their own scale, while adults had to crouch, look down, or adjust their own position to view the young artists’ work on their own terms.
Exhibition views
A community arts space for the whole family
Second Gen took place during the summer at the 20*20 House, a Borough-owned building managed by the Lansdowne Economic Development Corporation as a year-round community arts center. The setting allowed the exhibition to function differently from a conventional gallery.
Families could spend time together in a free, air-conditioned cultural space and return over multiple visits. The exhibition was designed for caregivers and children to experience together rather than separating adult cultural programming from children’s activities.
The project took place amid serious concerns about access to arts education in the surrounding school district. Against that backdrop, Second Gen treated creative experience as a present community need.
Candid views of visitors interacting with the exhibtion.
Participation built into the exhibition
Artist and educator Jeffrey Kimsey-Carroll contributed interactive works that invited visitors of all ages to stack, construct, make sound, experiment, and rearrange the gallery around them. A large collaborative building area used bamboo, clamps, rope, painted components, and artist-designed textiles to create temporary forts and structures.
The activities altered the gallery’s expected behavior. Children were not asked to remain quiet and look with their hands crammed into their pockets, and caregivers did not have to choose between engaging with the exhibition themselves and tending to the young people with them.
All images curtesy of Lansdowne Economic Development Corporation
Clare Finin 