MoMA’s Girl
January 18, 2023 – New York City, New York, USA
The students from Mr. Ziggler’s art class got spread between two subway cars. He nervously motioned for everyone to stay together and keep an eye out for him or one of the parents volunteering to help with the field trip.
Marisol found a seat close to the door. She had a good view of the outside world. She had taken the Number 7 Train into the city many times and liked to watch the transformation as she moved through Queens. Steel and brick apartment buildings and row houses turned into steel and glass warehouses as they approached the river.
The students from her art class laughed and chatted together, but most were older than Marisol. She was only in ninth grade and had not bothered making friends with any of them. She kept to herself and kept her eyes on the train car’s window.
When the class reached their stop in Manhattan, Mr. Ziggler shouted for everyone to get out and stay together. The class marched chaotically through the station and up the escalator. They emerged near Times Square and Mr. Ziggler shouted for them to follow him through the river of cars and people flowing in the skyscraper canyon.
“That’s it! You see it?” Mr. Ziggler called, gesturing wildly to a building in the distance.
Marisol read the letters – MoMA – which stood for the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Ziggler talked about the place like it was the center of the universe, and the fieldtrip was his reward to the class for completing their end-of-semester projects.
The mob of students was steered into a security line along the sidewalk. Guards repeated that everyone would need to be searched and no food or drink was allowed inside the museum. Marisol and her classmates swallowed any water left in the bottles inside their backpacks. The line lurched forward until everyone from the class was standing in the museum’s enormous front lobby. Mr. Ziggler raced forward to explain to the admissions people that he was leading a school class on a tour.
The class was waved through a checkpoint and Mr. Ziggler raised his arms to capture his students’ attention. “We’re going to start on the top floors and work our way down. Remember to stay together. I want you in eye-contact with me at all times.”
The class stomped their way up to the fifth floor where Mr. Ziggler tried his best to act as a guide without disturbing the other visitors. “We’ll see some famous painters and paintings up here,” Mr. Ziggler loudly whispered. “I showed some of them to you in class. They’ve got a Van Gogh and some Monets.”
Mr. Ziggler frantically steered the class between rooms and excitedly pointed toward different pictures. A crowd was gathered around Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Mr. Ziggler encouraged everyone to get a good look. “It’s one of the most famous paintings in the world,” he called out in his loudest whisper.
Marisol took a turn in front of Starry Night before squeezing through the mass of visitors in the room. A lot of them looked like tourists and they all appeared eager and serious about seeing something extraordinary. Marisol’s classmates adopted the same seriousness and temporarily stopped joking with each other.
“Alright, let’s go down to the fourth floor,” Mr. Ziggler hissed to the teenagers in his class. “We’ll see some Picassos and a bit more modern pieces.”
Marisol followed the others through rooms mostly filled with paintings. The people in the images had exaggerated features, with oversized eyes and mouths. Some of them may not have been people at all and were simply fragments from someone’s imagination.
The third floor held even more imagination. There were paintings made with a single color. They looked like nothing more than lines on a wall or paint splashes. There were also collections of objects arranged to tell some kind of story. Marisol wondered what was so special about the chairs, tables, and lamps on display.
The first and second floors held more collections of everyday objects arranged in a special way. Marisol again wondered what was special about the laundry detergent boxes and paper cones on the floor. The serious faces disappeared from her classmates. They sniggered and said things like, “I don’t get it,” and “I could make something like this from my trash.” Many of them complained to Mr. Ziggler that their feet hurt and they were tired of walking.
“Look around! Aren’t you inspired by all the energy you see in the pieces?” Mr. Ziggler replied to his students.
“No. I’m sick of looking at this stuff,” was the typical response. “Anybody could throw it together.”
“It’s not as easy as you think to make something provocative. Something that inspires others,” Mr. Ziggler answered his bored students.
Out of his entire class, only one student listened to his pleas for attention. Marisol ignored her tired feet and let a strange lightness and curiosity carry her. The objects around her were familiar, but the setting was so much different than her everyday life. Like the rest of her classmates, when she looked at the displays, she thought to herself, “I could make something like that.” But unlike her classmates, Marisol did not see the projects as simple junk collections. She saw them as amazing.
Marisol saw herself constructing something equally amazing. Unlike anyone else who had ever visited the museum, she decided she would do it right there in an empty spot between two existing installations. There was plenty of floor space between some rusty steel blocks and a flowing sculpture made from glass jars and soup cans.
On the way home, while her classmates stared at their phones, Marisol closed her eyes and listened to the rhythmic clicking of the train. She needed a medium for her art project. What could she use that was plentiful and represented her world? She had no experience with metals or glass. She had dabbled in paint and wood, but those things were foreign to most of her life in Queens. She opened her eyes and looked down at the floor. An empty plastic water bottle laid there. She had not noticed it at first. It was invisible except for its ugly label. The label was not its fault. Underneath, it was clear and beautiful.
Marisol grabbed the bottle on her way out of the train. On her walk home, she found two more. She spent the night peeling the labels and picking off the glue underneath. Patches of glue stubbornly stuck to the plastic, so the next day, Marisol used chemicals in her school’s art studio to finally turn the bottles back into their original, perfect state. Marisol held the bottles up to the light and admired how easily she could see through them and how they produced reflections on the wall when they were tilted.
Marisol had saved up some money and after school she retrieved it from a drawer in her room. She told her mom she had to go out to work on an art project.
“Something for school?” Marisol’s mom asked.
“Yes,” Marisol replied. A school project was easier to explain than something she was building because of inspiration. “I have to work on it every day.”
Marisol took the Number 7 Train back into the city and found the MoMA security line. The only things in her backpack were three empty water bottles. After making it through the checkpoint, she bought a 30-day student pass and walked straight to the empty space waiting for her on the first floor.
Marisol did not go to work immediately. First, she circled the adjoining rooms to figure out there was a security guard assigned to the area. He walked around slowly and mostly looked at the ceiling as if he were outside looking up at the sky. Marisol waited until she was alone in her room and then reached across the string separating visitors from permanent residents. She arranged the three bottles so that they were all standing upright. Then she backed up and admired her work. Would anyone else see it as art or would they only see three plastic bottles left on the floor?
On the way home, Marisol collected four more plastic bottles. She again peeled the labels and removed the glue. She remained sick to her stomach with worry about the first three bottles on display. The next day, she took the first train available after school and ran to the MoMA. She raced to her spot. The bottles were still standing!
Marisol’s heart pounded as she again found herself alone. She pulled out the four new bottles and added some chaos to the arrangement. She turned one bottle onto its side.
“This looks like something,” Marisol whispered to herself.
She repeated the steps every day for a week. There were over thirty bottles in the collection when she overheard the reaction of a couple who walked through the room.
“What’s this supposed to be?” a young woman asked her friend.
“Looks like a random accident. I don’t think it’s supposed to be there,” the friend replied.
“I think it’s a real installation. It’s thoughtful. Not random.”
“I don’t see a sign for it.”
“Real art doesn’t need a sign.”
Despite what the woman said about not needing a sign, Marisol quickly decided her project was crying out for a sign. She took a picture of the signs displayed for other projects and then set to work duplicating the format and font. She only had access to free software, so the match was only approximate. She listed her name and year of birth.
As a name for the project, Marisol listed “Transparent”. She thought it was a good way to describe the bottles themselves and how people might look at them together and not realize they were not an accident. The signs for other projects had blurbs describing them. Marisol used the following for her blurb: We can choose to see common things as beautiful or ugly. This growing display was rescued from around the city.
Marisol used cardboard and glue from the art room to construct her physical sign. She snuck it through security and put it next to the bottles. When she stepped back and watched visitors’ reactions, she smiled as they read the sign, pointed, and nodded. No one questioned whether the bottles belonged.
The silent approval kept Marisol going. She was making something real. It provoked and created feelings. She returned each day to add to the collection. The first-floor security guards began to recognize her. She smiled at them and they smiled back. She was a part of the museum. She belonged, just like her project.
After a month, Marisol’s display contained over 100 bottles. With each visit, she rearranged them. She only had a few seconds at a time. The result was thoughtful chaos and each day it was different.
The original plan was to work for thirty days, but Marisol realized she could not simply walk away from the project. She would have to return. Perhaps she would visit less often. Maybe she would simply watch over the installation and make adjustments rather than add bottles. But it was now a part of her and she could not let go.
The project’s one-month mark happened to coincide with the day Marisol was discovered. It was gray and rainy outside and she was eager to get inside the museum and retreat to her spot. Two people were waiting for her. They stood directly in front of the water bottles and recognized her immediately. When they gestured toward her, Marisol wanted to run away. She froze instead.
Both people wore nametags. A man named Jack also wore a bowtie and earrings. His beard was shaved into jagged triangles. Next to Jack stood Rita. She had thick, black and gray curly hair. When Marisol looked at Rita, she was reminded of Mr. Ziggler.
“Young lady, are you responsible for that?” Jack demanded, pointing toward the water bottles.
Marisol’s throat tightened, but she managed so squeeze out a “Yes.”
“And I suppose you also created the sign?”
“Yes.”
“One cannot simply decide to display a project at the MoMA. Do you know how many artists would kill to be on display here? They spend a lifetime working for it.”
Marisol did not reply.
“How long have you been bringing in water bottles?” Jack asked angrily.
“Every day for a month,” Marisol replied quietly.
“And what made you think what you were doing deserved to be seen?”
Marisol dropped her eyes to the floor.
Rita’s voice interrupted the silence. “I think it shows extraordinary persistence and creativity.”
Jack scoffed. “It’s naïve. It’s not art.”
“Who’s to judge that?” Rita replied.
“Oh, come on.”
“Great artists don’t wait for an invitation.”
Jack scoffed again. “You can have your opinion, but the bottles can’t stay.”
Rita turned to Marisol. “I’m afraid he’s right. They can’t say. But I was thinking of something we might be able to do.”
Marisol stayed quiet as more people from the museum entered the room and joined the conversation. Some of them seemed angry. Others grinned and took a long look at the water bottles. They finally agreed that Marisol should be a part of a temporary exhibit for young, up-and-coming artists. Marisol agreed to move and rearrange her bottles in a smaller space dedicated and authorized for her.
The story of the rogue high school student invading the MoMA caught the imagination of people around the city. For a few short weeks, thousands of them came to see Transparent and to try and feel the same way Marisol did. And for those few short weeks, she was just as popular as Van Gogh and his Starry Night on the fifth floor.
As one art critic put it, Marisol was no longer Transparent and the world would be waiting for her to find a permanent spot in the MoMA.
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