Last Saturday a five-foot wall of cardboard boxes divided Patrick Miceli’s Ravenswood studio space in two. The boxes were filled with 40,000 to 45,000 of the small, brightly colored plastic toys given away with Happy Meals and other fast-food dinners for kids. “Every animated character you can imagine is in those boxes,” Miceli said as he and a friend, bundled up in the unheated room, methodically sorted the toys.
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Miceli, an artist who has teaching gigs at five schools, including Columbia and Truman colleges, was getting ready to set up an installation at Saint Xavier University on the far southwest side, where he planned to pile the toys into heaps by color. “They’re just sort of there,” he explained. “You could say it’s a pile of garbage. Maybe indirectly it references Indian burial mounds, like we’re burying ourselves under it.” He’s particularly interested in how the toys reinforce traditional gender roles and teach children to be consumers: “In the animated movie Pocahontas meets and falls in love with this Caucasian blond-haired guy. That movie becomes about romantic love. So kids at a very young age are taking this in, then they go to McDonald’s to get the characters. If you brought a child in here, they could tell you about every one of these.”
Miceli has his favorites, including a tiny Big Mac box that transforms into a toy camera as well as a replica of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. His grandparents lived around the corner from the old Oscar Mayer plant on Sedgwick north of Division. “I remember the Wienermobile would come down the street and give us these little whistles,” he says, “which I still have around somewhere.”
When: Lecture and reception Wed 2/15, 3:30 PM; runs through Mon 3/6
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Robert Drea.
