Art Play

Posted by Jennine Lanouette on Monday, May 9th, 2011

I’d like to devote a few blog inches to my aunt, the artist Lanny Lasky, who died this weekend. A small homage to pay for a highly influential and productive life.

Lanny made collages, boxes and sculptures out of cast off materials and found objects. Her work can be seen at lannylasky.com. She was also an arts educator, serving as the head of education at the Museum of Modern Art for many years. I look at her life and it suddenly seems no accident that I became a creative educator with a focus on art over commerce.

The memories flooding back are filled with subtle mentoring. Watercolor outings sitting by a woodland brook capturing the form of the rocks and the light of the rushing water over and around them. Art viewing outings at MoMA standing in front of Matisse’s The Back I, II, III and IV examining their progression from figurative to abstract. And every family gathering at our house beginning with Lanny wanting to see my lastest creative project, weather it be a woven belt made on a crude hand-built wooden loom or a four foot square mural on butcher paper of my cat sitting in front of a fireplace.

My three cousins, Mike, Andy and Alan, always had dirty faces, but when we would show up at their house for Christmas, the tree would be heavily laden with the most outlandish child-crafted ornaments you’ve ever seen. I have a later memory of a Christmas at her vacation home in Vermont when all us grown up kids, some with kids of our own, spent many peaceful hours at the dining table cutting snowflakes out of folded paper to hang from a wire traversing above us. Lanny had a way of just putting a few pieces of paper and a couple of scissors out on the table and then waiting to see what happens. Soon we’re pawing through the backs of drawers looking for more scissors cause everyone wants to join in.

If I may presume to sum up her philosophy, I would say that, for her, art was play infused with deep thinking. You can see it in her work. I’ll miss her.