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Children's Museum exhibit celebrates works of author Eric Carle | TribLIVE.com
Art & Museums

Children's Museum exhibit celebrates works of author Eric Carle

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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Just like 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar,' children can be transformed into beautiful butterflies at the 'Very Eric Carle' exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.
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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Giant blades of grass for “The Very Clumsy Click Beetle” display for the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh were created by Diamond Wire Spring Company in Ross
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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Children can sit in a web representing “The Very Busy Spider” at the 'Very Eric Carle' exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.
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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Children can weave their own spiderweb like “The Very Busy Spider,” at the 'Very Eric Carle' exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.
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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Children can weave their own spiderweb like “The Very Busy Spider,” at the 'Very Eric Carle' exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.
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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
The Children’s Museum’s fabrication shop in Manchester created a wooden piano-like object for “The Very Clumsy Click Beetle” to jump and flip by pressing keys.
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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
An overview of the 'Very Eric Carle' exhibit made for the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.
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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Overview of the 'Very Eric Carle' exhibit
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Children's Museum of Piottsburgh
The 'Night Symphony' mural will be a backdrop to the 'Very Eric Carle' exhibit.
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Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
The Click Beetle playscape in the 'Very Eric Carle' exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

At the Diamond Wire Spring Co. in Ross, a cacophony of mechanical noises reverberates off the ceiling and around the shop floor.

These springs are destined to hold giant blades of grass to their mounts, and make them bounce back to standing when bumped or stepped upon. The grass is part of “The Very Clumsy Click Beetle” portion of the still-in-creation “Very Eric Carle” exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

To demonstrate how the springs will work, Lisa Carvajal dives on top of a small triangular section of “grass” and rolls around. This fairly odd maneuver sparks smiles from the Diamond Wire Spring crew. Carvajal, exhibit design manager at the Children's Museum, does this sort of thing a lot.

“I don't think we had ever seen anyone rolling on the ground like that,” says Chris Fazio, Diamond Wire Spring general manager. “We're still talking about it.”

The Children's Museum needs something that will stand up to thousands of children playing very rough on its new exhibit, opening June 13. The $750,000 project is coming together through the efforts of a number of local, national and international manufacturers, workshops, craftsmen and artists. The exhibit is a joint production with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass.

The exhibit is funded through grants from the Eden Hall Foundation, the Hillman Foundation, the Wherrett Memorial Fund of the Pittsburgh Foundation and an anonymous donor.

The idea is to bring to life the “Very” books by the legendary children's author: “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” “The Very Lonely Firefly,” “The Very Clumsy Click Beetle,” “The Very Busy Spider” and “The Very Quiet Cricket.”

The plan is for kids to be the very hungry caterpillar, busy spider and the rest to experience the world through those eyes and the eyes of Eric Carle.

“He's one of the great creators of picture books in the U.S.,” says Alexandra Kennedy, executive director of the Eric Carle Museum. “He's pretty unrivaled. I think it's a combination of how beautiful and graphic his work is. He has a tremendous appreciation for children's natural aesthetic senses. They appreciate beautiful things. And the things he writes about are compelling to children — themes of nature, friendship.”

Other than regular appearances on “Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood,” Carle's main connection to Pittsburgh was a long working relationship with Jane Werner, the Children's Museum's executive director.

“(Werner) came to me and asked if we'd ever consider working together for an Eric Carle exhibit — we'd create it together and travel it around the country,” Kennedy says. “There have been many requests in the past. But, because Jane had that long-established relationship, and (the museum) has this reputation for being innovative — they've been recognized by museums all over country for their tremendous growth.”

In the exhibit, kids can help “The Very Lonely Firefly” use his light to find friends, weave their own spiderwebs like “The Very Busy Spider,” and help “The Very Clumsy Click Beetle” through a field of giant blades of grass.

“The Children's Museum knows how to make these really dynamic, very engaging 3-D exhibitions,” Kennedy says.

“It's been really fun for both teams. We've gone to Pittsburgh, and they've come to Amherst. To me, it was always a lovely marriage,” she says.

“The shame is that we'll only have it for three months,” says Anne Fullenkamp of the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, who helped direct the project. “Then it goes to Magic House in St. Louis. We spent nearly two years working on this, from the time it was conceived until now. The three months will go by in a flash.”

The Carle name and “Caterpillar's” popularity make it an easy sell to other museums. In the realm of children's literature, the book's influence has been enormous, winning awards for its story and graphic design. It was distributed by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2011 to promote healthy eating. It has been translated into 40 languages and even got a Google doodle on the search engine's homepage.

Traveling exhibits typically rent for three months, 14 to 16 weeks, Fullenkamp says. “Very Eric Carle” comes with a $70,000 rental fee. Currently, the exhibit is on track for a 30-city, 10-year tour.

“It's almost like Broadway shows,” Fullenkamp says. “Usually, it takes three years to get a return on your investment. Five is usually the average. For popular shows, they can go on for 10. We have one (traveling exhibit) called ‘How People Make Things,' and it is booked through 2017. It will hit its 10-year mark. We're thrilled.”

The endeavor has an international flair, with cocoon chairs being created by Yellow Goat in Australia and Lace Fence in India building the spider-web wrap frame. Local companies and designers involved include:

Diamond Wire Spring Co.

“Normally, when we get design requests, we need a spring to meet some kind of mathematical parameters,” says Diamond Wire Spring Co. engineer Terence Sahr. “Instead, it was, ‘We need this to look like grass.'

“It was a more intuitive project (than we're used to). It needed to flex like grass, but still be rigid enough to spring back up. When (Carvajal) came in to test this, we all thought she was crazy.”

The grass is made of foam, wrapped in a mottled green sleeve patterned on the distinctive look of Carle's hand-painted paper collage-based artwork. It took weeks of meetings to settle on the material and the look. There will be 100 square feet of grass, and 450 individual blades, with some backup blades.

XYZ Custom

The giant spiderweb for “The Very Busy Spider” is coming together at XYZ Custom, a fabrication shop on the North Side. Children will be able to test their spider-like dexterity as they make their way through the web.

The concept was created by Kitty Spangler, a Lawrenceville-based artist who helped organize the Knit the Bridge project, the massive 2013 installation that briefly covered the Andy Warhol Bridge in yarn.

“I'm a painter, but my dad and uncles were all engineers, so I have this sort of ‘figure it out' mentality,” Spangler says.

Her solution involved making lace out of heavy-duty, but fairly soft, polypropylene rope. Lace-making is a technique more than it is a finished object, she points out. She got the idea from the work of Manca Ahlin, a Slovenian-born artist who did a massive lace partition for a restaurant in New York City.

“It's lace-work, even though it's huge. It's heavy, but this is just lace on steroids,” Spangler says. “Hemp rope would be very rough on your skin. (Polypropylene) doesn't stretch much, doesn't hold dirt.”

At the Children's Museum, the spiderweb will be hung from a PVC-pipe infrastructure, engineered by XYZ to easily collapse for storage and transportation. This is crucial — if it can't be easily disassembled and reassembled, it's not going to last long as an exhibit.

At XYZ, they are also assembling a completely different feature for “The Very Quiet Cricket” portion.

Images of Cricket and his friends appear on a large relief mural. When touched, they each make sounds. Combined, the insects harmonize together as “The Night Symphony.”

Children's Museum fabricators

At the Children's Museum's fabrication shop in Manchester, exhibits designer and technician Nicholas Hohman has been working on several parts of the exhibit at once. In particular, he's getting “The Very Clumsy Click Beetle” to jump and flip by pressing keys on a wooden piano-like object.

“A big part of the book is about trying and trying over again,” Hohman says. “He flips over and gets stuck on his back a lot.”

While the temptation is to build exhibits that are as interactive as possible, it's easy to do too much.

“Eric Carle is kind of always zooming in and out — you're the bug, and then you're looking at the bug,” Hohman says. “I think it's nice to have shifting perspectives like that. Sometimes, what I like to do is pull back a bit, so it doesn't have to do too much, and let the kids make of it what they want.”

Michael Machosky is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at mmachosky@tribweb.com or 412-320-7901.