I don’t think I liked art very much as a child. I thought it was fine. Sure, I lived in New York, probably one of the best cities for art in the world, but if my parents were taking me to a museum I wanted to see the stuff. I wanted to see the stuffed elephants at the Museum of Natural History, the mummies and the baseball cards at the Met. My brother agreed, he wanted to see the swords and the armor and the big giant blue whale and the much more menacing squid.
Contemporary art was out of the question. I’m not actually sure that I was aware art was something still made, when I was a child. It was just something boring your grandma would make you stare at while she explained its hidden meanings to you.
Except– can I tell you that my soul was rocked my spirits lifted and my world changed by The Gates? For sixteen days in the dead of winter when I was ten, when the joy of the holidays wears off and the days are still short and there seems to be no end of frozen earth in sight, Central Park, my backyard, was transformed into a futuristic landscape where saffron-orange cascaded from on high. The skies over the usual paths I walked, their banks blanketed with a snow that was once permanent until mid-march’s thaw, were magical beautiful summer sunset orange. If that’s art, then holy crap. That’s great.
—Zoe Dubno