I was a NYC kid. My junior high school friends and I took the subway all over NYC. Often the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was the destination. On weekends we took the E train from Parsons Blvd in Queens to 53rd St in Manhattan. Those trips were the beginning of my mascot maker education.

….and ohmygoodness, the things we saw. It was there that I had my first encounter with Claus Oldenburg. When I saw all of his soft sculptures, I knew I had just fallen in love with fabric and foam. Oldenburg’s soft sculptures from the 60′s and early 70′s still make me swoon. The soft-sculpture hamburger is big, familiar, funny and American. Really not that different from a mascot. Put some googlie eyes on the burger and the pickle becomes a beret!

….and, of course – it being MoMA – there was Picasso. There was a huge, Picasso show at the MoMA when I was a kid. His costumes for the Ballet Russe performance, “Parade” were in that show. These were enormous costumes – really more like wearable, cubist sculptures. I felt like those costumes were there just for me. Thank you Picasso

I’m pretty sure the curators at MoMA never thought they were providing some sort of job training program for a future mascot maker.

In the ’60′s, a young teens w/ a dollar or 2 in allowance could afford to hang out at MoMA for the day. We had fun skittering up and down the stairs. We saw art in the galleries, art films in the theater and nibbled on sandwiches in the sculpture garden. We weren’t especially precocious. Hanging out at the Museum was what NYC kids did then.

Robert Fulghum claims, everything he needed to know, he learned in kindergarden…and, really, his are great rules to live by —basically hold hands, be nice and flush.

As a teenager, growing up in Queens, the Museum of Modern Art taught me to open my eyes and my mind. Could I possibly say, “Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned at the Museum of Modern Art?”