Playground of My Mind

Front Cover
DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017 - Architecture - 62 pages
Through exquisite drawings and storytelling, Julia Jacquette's graphic memoir provides a distinctive account of her childhood in Manhattan in the 1960s and 1970s. Inspired by the adventure playgrounds from her youth growing up in New York City, the painter Julia Jacquette explores the brightly colored structures of the play spaces and the surrounding landscape of the city in Playground of My Mind. With compelling illustrations and personal narrative, this book features adventure playgrounds created by architects Richard Dattner, M. Paul Friedberg, the partnership Ross Ryan Jacquette in New York City, and Aldo van Eyck in Amsterdam. These structures encouraged constructive, imaginative play and gave renewed life to utopian notions of American and European modernist architecture. Playground of My Mind reflects upon the period of the 1960s and 1970s which was a tumultuous time of social change and activism in New York City and throughout the United States. While considering the conflicted emotions that envelop idealized aspects of the past, this unique book captures the nostalgia for a bygone era of New York life in vivid detail.

Published in association with the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College in association with the exhibition, Julia Jacquette: Unrequited and Acts of Play.

About the author (2017)

Julia Jacquette is an American artist who divides her time between Amsterdam and New York City. Her work has been shown extensively at galleries and museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and The RISD Museum. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Princeton University, and is currently on the faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology (NYC).

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