Beyond the Page: Exhibit Design Challenge: Taking Picture Books in an Entirely New Direction

You have been asked to judge a competition.

You have been asked to judge a competition involving picture books.

This competition also involves students.

You might be inclined to think, logically, that the competition is for students to create their own picture books. Certainly such competitions exist all over the United States.

Or, even more fun, it could be a diorama competition. Kids create dioramas based on famous picture books and you judge their creativity, attention to detail, knowledge of the book, etc.

But… well, no. That’s not it either, really.

First and foremost, you need to know the entity holding this competition, officially named Beyond the Page: Exhibit Design Challenge. That would be The Rabbit hOle in Kansas City, MO. If you are unfamiliar with The Rabbit hOle, you could read my write-up here, or you could simply understand that it is the most all-encompassing picture book museum in the (checks notes) world. Seriously. There are a lot of museums out there dedicated to single creators (Eric Carle, Quentin Blake, etc.) but surprisingly few that look at such a wide swath of picture books all at once. And how many that do will allow you to climb INTO the exhibits? To walk into the Blueberries for Sal kitchen and play with the canning equipment, or to really find out what’s in the bear’s stomach in I Want My Hat Back? That’s what The Rabbit hOle accomplishes. And that brings us to our competition.

They put the notice in just one of their newsletters. It would be a competition for schools where participating classrooms would be broken up into teams. Each team would select a picture book and then work a little with a fabricator from the museum to figure out how to create a model of an exhibit from said book. The kids would be given a specific list of supplies and then do all the work. No AI. No 3-D computing. Just smarts and talent and creativity to figure out what to do with one book or another.

Readers, they got more responses from more schools than they could accept. In the end, 220 4th-8th grade students from eleven classrooms across the Kansas City metro area took part. Then they split those students into two categories: the 4^th and 5^th graders and the middle schoolers.

My job? To work with a mix of Rabbit hOle board members and picture book creators (Jordan Strickland Morris and Rahele Jomepour Bell) to select the top of the pops, the best of the best, etc. To find some winners.

In other words, torture.

Oh, incredibly fun torture, absolutely! Would do it again in a heartbeat. But the kids? They really shouldn’t have selected these particular kids. These kids turned out to be massively talented and that really put a crimp in my style. Who wants to try to judge actually talented children? You know. The ones who know what they’re doing and make incredible choices.

Today, I’m going to show you just a sampling of some of the books and models these kids came up with and you are going to ooh and aahhh and then head on over to the Rabbit hOle where you will compliment Pete and Deb for coming up with this in the first place. And in case you are curious, no the ultimate prize was NOT making the kids’ projects for real in the Rabbit hOle spaces. As fun as that might be, there’s this little pesky copyright problem that might give one pause. Instead the prizes were gift cards and museum passes.

And now! On with the show!

… but first!

Sorry, sorry, but I loved this so much that I couldn’t let it go. You see, as judges we had this whole rubric we had to fill out that looked at a wide variety of considerations for each project. Things like, how well the kids gave their presentation to each judge, whether or not they showed particular originality and creativity, etc. And one category was about how well they kept notes on their process. Here they would do some research on their books’ creators. And some of them even went so far as to draw images of them. Here then, for your viewing enjoyment, are my favorite two portraits of Shel Silverstein:

And yes. You can tell he would have adored them.

Okay. For realsies now. The exhibits!! Or, at the very least, a couple of them.

I’m going to show each design with its requisite special features, so you get a taste of how hard these kids worked on these ideas. First up:

Top Cat by Lois Ehlert

The kids explained that in the book a small kitten comes to live with a large cat. To put you in the footsteps of the kitten you enter through a cardboard box with holes cut into the side to peek into the room. Once in there are giant murals of the big cat on the walls. They created a scratching area on the wall out of those sequins you can flip, and even wove that little rug you see out of paper. In the actual exhibit, they explained, you would bounce on the chair (which is where you see that purple balloon for maximum bounciness), see your reflection in the spoons, and play with the water (which isn’t real water). I particularly liked that they put small words on the walls that replicate the small words in the book.

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The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt, ill. Oliver Jeffers

This one really won me over. The kids realized that the best way to do this would be for you to enter and each room would be a different crayon. Then, at the end of the hallway you will find this gigantic mural from that two-page spread near the end of the book. Note how the tale of the orange whale is in the mural but its front half is a model in the room that you can touch. I thought the models of the crayons themselves were particularly great (and they made sure to just draw the white crayon on the wall).

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Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin, ill. James Dean

So the idea with this exhibit is that you climb the “pile of strawberries” then slide down the other side…

The blueberries you walk in is a ball pit….

And the brown mud is a trampoline.

I, for my part, just adored these drawings they made of shoes on the sides. They also created small models of shoes and hung those from various telephone wires throughout the exhibit.

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Next up…

Actually, I have no idea what book this is from but I loves it. Loves it, I sez.

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Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin, Daniel Salmieri

Aw man. Look at this sketch they made for this exhibit:

The whole thing centers on putting together these little felt tacos in a house. It was nicely done, but so was…

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Roller Coaster by Marla Frazee

This is an exhibit you just sit in and it rumbles and makes a breeze like you’re riding on a real coaster. One assumed there would also be screams.

Then we had a whole slew of picture books that I, personally, had never heard of. These included (but were not limited to):

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I Know a Lady by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by James Stevenson

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Miss Twiggley’s Tree by Dorothea Warren Fox

(Note how cool this model is, considering that it is mostly constructed out of popsicle sticks)

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Mel’s Diner by Marissa Moss

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When Spring Comes by Kevin Henkes

(yes, I know it, but it’s not a Henkes I remember as clearly)

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Ask Me by Bernard Waber, illustrated by Suzy Lee

Then there was the humor part of the program. Some kids really leaned into this. As in:

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Fancy Nancy and the Fanciest Doll in the World by Jane O’Connor, ill. Robin Preis Glasser

I never heard the explanation of this, and it’s been a day or two since I read the book, but isn’t this the scene where Jojo draws on Nancy’s doll?

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The Good Egg by Jory John, ill Pete Oswald

First, note that there are four rooms that you can go through, that embody four different scenes in the book. But our favorite of these, obviously, was the bathroom. Egg on toilet brushing its teeth? That’s a yes from me.

Some displays also really thought through the interactive elements.

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The Smallest Girl in the Smallest Grade by Justin Roberts, ill. Christian Robinson

Not only can you create your own trays of food in this exhibit, but note that in the back a kid has dropped their tray. You now have to decide if you will help clean it up or not.

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Maddi’s Fridge by Lois Brandt, ill. Vin Vogel

So in this one, you meticulously move food from one fridge to another (the book is about food insecurity). There is also (and I don’t quite remember this from the book) a rock climbing wall which takes you up to the second level.

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The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson, ill. Axel Sheffler

One of the finest models of an exhibit we saw. You proceed on this path, essentially through the book, and at the end (hidden from view) is the Gruffalo you will face in the end. Very labyrinth & minotaur-esque.

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Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

And I will leave you with this one. Thought. Care. Time. Attention. Tonally correct too.

Huge thanks to Pete Cowdin and Deb Pettid for letting me take part in all of this. And if you’re interested in seeing the real interactive exhibits at the museum, you need only stop by. It is DEFINITELY worth the trip. And for more information about The First Annual Exhibit Design Challenge you can read this synopsis by The Rabbit hOle itself, or read the local news coverage from KCUR 89.3 and Fox 4.

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