It’s not always easy for art and parenthood to intersect, but a new gallery show in downtown Northampton is making that rare space for a limited time.
A.P.E. Gallery will host “Imaginary Friends,” an exhibition featuring collaborative works created by parents and their children. The gallery will hold an opening reception on Tuesday, June 23, from 4 to 6 p.m. Following the reception, the show will run Wednesday, June 24, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Thursday, June 25, and Friday, June 26, from 12 to 6 p.m.; and Saturday, June 27, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“We’re trying to make art that is interesting and exciting for children and adults, and not to create this distinction between the two — in the same way that we’re trying to make art together with our children,” said Daniel Sack, who contributed a piece to the show alongside his 4-year-old daughter, Thalia.
The exhibition will feature a diverse array of media. Highlights include a film of a dancer exploring the empty gallery space with his son, an animated short film created with a young child in a sandbox, and an interactive installation built from cello boxes decorated by an artist’s family. According to event producer Alex Ripp, the installation explores foundational questions like, “What is dwelling? What invites you in? How do you occupy space with other people?”
“We’re trying to say, ‘This is not a show where you’re done. You should just treat this as an experiment. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be done. It doesn’t have to be anything you understand yet,’” said Ripp.
Sack and Ripp are both parents — in fact, they’re husband and wife. Ripp, who is a fundraising consultant and theater producer, has a background in dance, dramaturgy, arts administration and grant writing. Sack teaches at the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has a background in theater and writing.
The South Hadley couple both share a love of experimental art and wanted to figure out if it was possible to bring their children into that practice. They asked other parent-artists about the stresses of keeping parenting and art separate. They wondered, “How do you make a more mutual, comfortable intersection of those?” while also “recognizing that our kids are experimental and imaginative,” Ripp said.
“It’s kind of cliché to say that, but we were seeing it firsthand,” she added. “We started with a question: Could you do it? Could you have a real, genuine collaboration with a child in an experimental arts practice? What would it look like, and what would it free you up to do?”
“We think of our kids as using art as a language that they’re experimenting with, too — that they’re always creating things from scratch and reinventing the wheel — even what a wheel is. They’re discovering day by day,” Sack said. As a result, he noted, kids are “perfect companions in a kind of adventurous and boundary-breaking way of thinking.”
The show gets its title from the notion that parents are, in a sense, imaginary friends for their children.
“They often call on us and cast us to play different parts in their lives to act alongside them,” Sack said, adding that children are likewise “imaginary friends” for their parents, too. “They open up our realms of possibility, and we think about the way that that is about what’s there and what’s not there — the inventive play of that. For me, it’s about that … idea of what’s possible, what could be, and how children are always on the cusp of that.”
Though a show like this helps parent-artists, it also helps the participating kid-artists by giving them an opportunity to see themselves as creatives.
“It’s an opportunity for us to play together. A lot of our kids see us making art or thinking about art a lot, but then they want to participate in some way, so it’s inviting them into the work that we do and taking them seriously as creators,” Sack said. “We often sort of think about children’s art as either rudimentary or aiming to be like adult art, but [we want] to try to respect and honor their work as its own entity and to honor their creativity as something wild and unique.”
“A gallery can be an intimidating space, even for adults,” Ripp said. There aren’t a lot of galleries where you can draw on the art, she pointed out, but this show wants to instill “a sense of, this is a place where you engage, and this is a place where you can build community and have ideas alongside other people, no matter what age you are.”
The participating artists — not including their children, whose full names are not listed publicly — are Hallie Bahn, Christina Balch, Nora De La Cour, Lisa Iglesias, Bodhild Iglesias, Sarah Marcus, Lucia Monge, Katie Richardson, Daniel Sack, Dante Sepúlveda, Aleksandra Ponomareva, Jules Skloot, Marianna Dixon Williams and Amy Nicole Buckley.
For more information, visit apearts.org/arc-2026.
