Tag Archives: talking art

Art and Stories Show for Libraries 2025

Presenting a creative adventure in art through stories and painted faces designed to encourage and inspire young artists, with fantastic, colorful folktales like The Rainbow Bat and The Power of the Jaguar; original tales like The Amazing Face Story and Picasso the Thief; plus fun bits of tales from the lives of famous artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Matisse and Monet.

In addition to folktales and original stories, this summer’s show includes material from my arts-in-education program Talking Art — exploring origins, inspirations and appropriations from the history of art, including the fundamental questions of what is art and why do we make it?

Featuring my 5’ x 8’ painting depicting the panoramic history of transformation in art, from Cave Walls to Andy Warhol, plus a D.I.Y. activity for parents and kids to do after the show in which they design a symbolic animal mask using traditional concepts that go back to the origins of art.

From a wide repertoire of stories I select tales to suit each new audience, and to be sure to perform new tales if I’ve been to your library before. A typical performance runs 60 minutes, with 4 or 5 stories involving 5 – 10 volunteers being facepainted onstage as I tell my tales. Like a magician would do, I pick volunteers from the audience to be part of the show onstage while I am also engaging the full audience with my storytelling and additional audience involvement. The content is targeted towards school aged kids and family audiences, including toddlers is ok. I bring a sound system, require no special equipment, and comfortably perform for small groups or audiences of up to 250.

Please contact me with any questions, or to schedule a performance.

Email to: info@agostinoarts.com

For a reference, please contact your colleagues at one of the tri-state libraries I performed at in 2024: 

Clifton, NJ • North Bergen, NJ  •  East Granby, CT  •  Rockville Library, Vernon, CT  •  Plattekill, NY  •  Bronxville, NY   •  Wyckoff, NJ • Cranford, NJ  •  Sayreville, NJ  •  Mattituck and Laurel Libraries, NY  •  Warren County Libraries, NJ  •  Hamilton Township, NJ  • Deer Park, NY  •  Sayville, NY  •  Patchogue-Medford, NY  •  Long Beach, NY  •  Centre Moriches, NY  •  Cresskill, NJ   

Christopher Agostino’s StoryFaces  is an exciting storytelling show in which I paint the faces of audience volunteers to illustrate the stories as I tell them, captivating the audience with my uniquely animated tales. It is an unusual show, with this unique combination of stories and visual art, so you might also want to watch the video: 

  See the video: What Is A StoryFace?

——   ALSO AVAILABLE for the Color Our World Theme ——

a banner image composed of 7 photographs of faces painted as recognizable art by famous painters, with the text reading Art On Your Face

Our Transformation Facepainting artists can turn your guests into living works of art for library events, re-creating recognizable paintings by famous artists and original designs inspired by fine art. You will be amazed at the quality of the faces and how quickly we paint them — these are all examples of faces painted on guests at events. 
Contact us for more information or to schedule an artist, and see the faces at the Art On Your Face Gallery.

a montage of photographs from StoryFaces performances

Christopher Agostino’s StoryFaces

Problematic Matisse: Large Decoration with Masks

On my second visit to the Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibit at MOMA in 2015, I spent half an hour in the last room, the room with the wall-sized works, the beautiful world Matisse was making with colored paper as his final act.

from Talking Art banner

At the end of a gallery talk in front of Large Decoration with Masks, the speaker connected the two mask images in the piece to the early emphasis of mask imagery in Matisse and Picasso’s work, and that this is “problematic”. In the context of that room, the comment struck me as unnecessary, as well as inaccurate. Afterwards I asked him why he said it. He gave the explanation I expected, that a current understanding links the appropriation from cultural sources in the “Modern Primitivism” those artists were doing in the 1910s as connected to European colonialism.

I gathered he felt he had to add that comment about the masks, but it wasn’t the social necessity for the statement that bothered me, I understood that, it was my perception of an incorrectness in his description of these mask images.

In this work, these are not really “masks”, these are faces. In modern art, the mask has become a face. In traditional cultural arts, the mask is a disguise and transformation of human identity. In Matisse and modern art, the mask stylization is used to explore/reveal identity in portraiture. In this work, these faces could not be more essentially human. They are the human face boiled down to the simplest form, a set of shapes encircled by a line, just as the flowers are the simplest form of flower shapes. Matisse has gone far beyond the inspirations he found in African mask art.

And to say that the inclusion of two small mask images by an accomplished elder artist nodding back to his inspirations, in this incredible 11′ by 33′ garden of colors, created in a technique Matisse invented, is somehow “appropriation” seemed so unnecessary. Especially in the case of Matisse, whose early mask exploration were just one part of a period of “Radical Invention” (MOMA exhibit 2010, how quickly they forget) as he worked through multiple inspirations to develop them into his original art.

From this experience, and others, I realize that I have an insight into problematic questions about cultural appropriation, and not just in my own problematic career. My work gives me a lens into larger questions. I have been developing stories and performance pieces on such origins, inspirations and appropriations for schools and adult audiences, and this has become my new show:  Talking Art 

Talking Art logo image with two faces painted in mask designs and two quotes: “Men had made these masks for a sacred purpose...At that moment I realized that this is what painting is all about...it’s a form of magic...” — Pablo Picasso and “Brought to life when it is worn, the mask brings gods to earth...conversely, by masking himself, man affirms he is a social being.” — Claude Lévi-Strauss

Related articles

Talking Art — Performances and Workshops

This page has been updated to a new  Talking Art  page.