The USA is the only country in the United Nations that hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. What exactly does this mean? What does it look like? In a collection of paintings and digitally designed posters currently on exhibit at All My Relations Arts, artist Moira Villiard explores the essence of childhood and children’s rights in modern times. This work calls attention to individual cognitive dissonance—the “doublethink” that occurs when people hold two contradictory beliefs about an issue or situation.

The Waters of Tomorrow

Artist’s Statement:

Our water today is the same water our ancestors drank from - it’s the same water they took care of just enough to leave for us. With this in mind, it’s necessary to also consider how we leave the things we were given.

Our water today is the water of tomorrow and the next day, and the next. It is the water our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren will enjoy for play, for sustenance, for prayer, and more, and so it’s necessary to leave it better than we found it.

The children in this image include children of two different times - the one on the left is me as a child and the one on the right is a child who exists today, and whose story (as it changes) is not one that I seek to romanticize, but simply honor with her loose depiction … in that moment, she’s a child of today splashing in the puddles, swinging from the jungle gym above a world that’s probably just as big as her imagination. We both are that child.

Of course, the world I reference is the same world that places some childhoods in cages, both real and metaphorical. It is also a world of false mothers and fathers. It’s one that haphazardly clings to logical fallacies in an effort to infuse rights into the unborn before they even breathe, and long before acknowledging the rights of the breathing or even the right to breathe.

“There are debates about how to define a child when the reality is we - in the United States - scarcely have a blueprint for what rights that child would be entitled to once granted their own existence. Some children sacrifice themselves to survive and become children in adult bodies. Some children are parents, others are contributing members of society, others slaves...”

To be a child today, or a child of any day, is to know the reality of your own experience out of context, and to be a reflection of tomorrow. And none of the contexts should ever end on a single opinion or conversation.

Consent and complexity

Siblings [left], Mother and Daughter [right], by Moira Villiard

The artist shared with Youth Circulations that the subjects of the paintings include a mixture of images of Villiard as a child and referenced photos of people she knows (who also are mixed identity) when they were children. Villiard felt she could not adequately get consent from children to paint them for this exhibit so instead relied on the permission of people who are no longer children and who can consent to the use of their childhood photos. Some of the children have specific stories that the work tries to capture. Other pieces explore the fun and curiosity of youth in a more general sense. The combination of depictions allows for a broader illustration of the complexity of childhood and the rights that come with it.

About the artist: Moira Villiard is a fiscal year 2019 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.