Gallery of Children’s Art

Inkahoots’ identity for GoCA is based on the work of pioneering children’s art researcher Rhoda Kellogg. The imagery and logotype forms derive from Kellogg’s categorisations of the stages of childhood mark-making: from basic scribbles, to diagrams, combines, aggregates and beyond.

The identity conveys both the validity of children’s creativity and its playful energy, as well as the seriousness of the venture, in order to defy common expectations about the legitimacy of children’s art.

Why GoCA? It’s a radical proposition. Children are rarely granted the status of cultural producers and decision makers.

Even in so-called progressive democratic societies, we often still struggle to see children as fully human, with needs and rights as valid as adults’. And in the art world, institutions often relegate children to the periphery. Even galleries with children’s programming position young children primarily as learners, and seperate from adult’s experiences. When they’re not ignoring them, museums are “othering children with child-friendliness”. Not to mention a stubborn denial of their role as artists, which of course has a lot to do with what can and can’t be commodified for the art market.

GoCA is a long overdue validation of children’s creative agency, and recognition of young people as active cultural participants.

Stage 1 of the project was a proof of concept phase that included the inaugural exhibition, Starting Young, a show featuring leading Australian artists such as Vernon Ah Kee, Patricia Piccinini, Judy Watson, Ross Manning, Madonna Staunton, Luke Roberts and Gordon Bennett, and included their adult art work alongside their childhood drawings and paintings.