New Exhibit at Discovery Lab
"Cardboard Colony" Opens Sept. 14
What would the Gathering Place look like if you were an ant, bee or dragonfly?
A new exhibit at Discovery Lab invites kids to find out — and almost everything they’ll see began as something quite less magical: cardboard.
Created by Tulsa artists Luis Flores of Not Boxed In and Symon Hajjar of Hot Toast Music Company, the immersive exhibit transforms the museum’s southeast corner into a world inspired by the insects, plants and familiar sights of the Gathering Place.
The idea is to let children experience the park from a completely different perspective.
“What would it be like to visit Gathering Place as a bug?” Hajjar says. “When you’re a bug, you see things a different way.”
Luis Flores and Symon Hajjar at the entrance to Cardboard Colony. Photo courtesy Discovery Lab
Kids will encounter a giant shoe overhead, crawl through ant tunnels, move ant eggs from damp to dry spaces and explore a pond beneath colorful lily pads. They can use puppets to create their own pond stories, collect “pollen” from flowers, make music and search for surprises throughout the exhibit.
Even the underside of the giant shoe contains a familiar detail: a map of Gathering Place and Riverside.
There’s science merged into the fun, too. A worm area, for example, introduces kids to real worm anatomy, and QR codes throughout the exhibit will connect families with songs and facts about the creatures they encounter.
But perhaps the most surprising part of the exhibit is what it’s made from.
Cardboard that might otherwise have been discarded has been cut, shaped and reimagined into trees, insects, flowers, tunnels and oversized pieces of the natural world. Other recycled and repurposed materials are incorporated throughout the space.
“It was going to get thrown away,” Flores says. “So we said, ‘Hey, let’s turn this into something that can be inspirational for everyone.’”
That accessibility is important to both artists. They want children to leave Discovery Lab knowing that creativity doesn’t require expensive supplies or even a trip to a museum. A box from the recycling bin can be the beginning of something extraordinary.
“When you look around and break it down, it’s just shapes,” Hajjar says. “That’s so inspiring because it’s really just glue and recycling—garbage—and that’s it.”
The artists hope the exhibit itself will continue to change as children interact with it. Eventually, kids may be invited to draw or paint on portions of the installation, adding their own creativity to the work. When the exhibit comes down, Flores and Hajjar even hope children can help dismantle it, with many of the materials saved and transformed again for future projects.
“We don’t waste,” Flores says.
For Hajjar and Flores, the project has been a labor of love, with late nights spent building after their regular workdays and ideas continuing to evolve as the exhibit takes shape.
And that sense of possibility may be exactly what they hope kids take home.
“Anybody can do this,” Hajjar says. “You can literally go home and look through your recycling bin and create.”
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