Since 1919, The New School has been home to scholars, creators, and activists who challenge convention and boldly make their mark on the world. To celebrate this groundbreaking legacy, we are opening our doors to the public for a weeklong festival of innovative performances, talks, workshops, screenings, exhibitions, and more.
On October 1–6, 2019, join us as we reflect on a century of world-changing ideas and together imagine a new kind of future.
Limited Capacityfull Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
In this gallery tour, the curator provides visitors with background and details of the exhibit objects and images. The complications of the games in videos and in poetry are explained while the participants ask questions about the various play environments. Each tour lasts approximately 30 minutes.
About the Exhibit: Eyes on the Board invites viewers to experience board games popular in different corners of the world, or from a distant past, while making connections across time and space. It reenacts first contact with an unknown game by exposing a New York City audience to a set of diverse boards, (moving) images, and poetry.
Board games serve as social lubricants, facilitating interaction between different groups of people as their abstract nature requires little to no cultural appropriation. Unlike other forms of play, they travel largely unchanged across geographic, cultural, linguistic, and even enemy borders. For at least 5,000 years, board games have connected people across generations and disparate regions of the world. Their travels suggest that we can be captured by board games even if the rules and boards are unfamiliar.
This exhibition highlights the exposure to game worlds that, contrary to today’s game designs, are the result of a long history of a practice that seems both innovative and resistant to change. Although these games may also appeal to children, all examples displayed are mainly or exclusively played by adults.
