Playing with Polygons: A Pathway Patterns Interactive Exhibit

Biddle Gallery
2840 Biddle Ave.
Wyandotte, MI 48192
734-281-4779
Gallery Hours: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, 11:00AM - 5:00PM
Contact Person: Carol Cook Reid 734-283-7996, pathwaypatterns@gmail.com, www.pathwaypatterns.com


Playing with Polygons

A Pathway Patterns Interactive Exhibition with Events By Carol Cook Reid and Friends

Opening Reception on January 20, 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.
Continuing through Closing on February 17, 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.


Playing with Polygons will open at Biddle Gallery in Wyandotte between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. on Friday, January 20 and play through February 17. Visitors to the exhibit are invited to select parts to build patterns in a creative play arena. The parts include interactive components with geometric designs. During the opening, participants will build a wall pattern.

The exhibit will include completed works by the artist and collaborating friends, and incomplete works for on site participation by gallery visitors. The incomplete works will evolve through the run of the exhibit.


Several events will extend playtime in the gallery:

Build a floor mandala in the gallery center on January 29 between 1:00 and 4:00 p.m.
Create and connect tabletop patterns on February 5 between 1:00 and 4:00 p.m.
Hear poetry and song by downriver writers and musicians on February 9 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Write and post conversations between parts on February 11 between 1:00 and 4:00 p.m.

Join the artist in disassembling the patterns back into parts following the closing on February 17.

Carol Cook Reid is a social artist. She is the designer, maker, and facilitator of Pathway Patterns, an interactive art medium and process that brings people and art together to explore visual and social relationships, discover pathways, and build patterns. Pathway Patterns has been shared with over thirty diverse community groups and presented in Detroit Grand Rapids, Michigan and New York. Ms. Reid resides in Brownstown Township. She received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art Education from Michigan State University, and taught elementary school art. Retiring in 2003, she resumed her education and art practice and recently completed a Masters of Arts Degree in Painting at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Pathway Patterns Description

Pathway Patterns is an interactive medium and process that brings people together with art.

The interactive medium is a collection of individual design parts. One hundred basic, bi-colored designs are based on one common skeleton. These designs are extended with reflections, color reversals, and twelve color combinations to provide more than two thousand parts. The parts are hand painted on 3” x 3” x1/8” wood squares. Individual parts present unique designs, but like many construction toys, they contain interactive potentials.

Visual relationships occur between parts at their meeting edges. Matching colors can extend shapes between parts to form pathways. The shape and direction of these pathways are determined by the relative placement of the parts. The aesthetic outcome depends on the relationship of each part to previously placed parts.


The interactive process promotes cooperation through shared decision-making. Participants make individual aesthetic choices as they select parts and connect them to parts placed by others. Over time and space, these choices form an ever-evolving foundation pattern of pathways that start, continue, stop, and restart between the past and the future - recording interactions between parts and participants. The outcome is a map of shared creativity, a temporary pattern formed from many parts by many hands. Extended patterns develop unplanned and unexpected images. Frogs, dinosaurs, birds, fish, horses, acrobats, dancers, trees, and flowers emerge to amuse both participants and viewers.

Pathway Patterns engages people with diverse life experiences, perceptions, and expectations, and has been presented in a variety of settings including schools, a hospital, fine art gallery, soup kitchen, executive office, bicycle repair shop, library, factory, city park, senior center, municipal center, university student center, family dining room, and nursing home; on the floor, a wall, and tabletops.

Constructing from the simple to the complex, and being a part of a greater whole appeals to everyone. The aesthetic challenge inspires both artists and non-artists. Some people are content to place one part; others may join together to work for hours. Some participants return day after day and experience the gradual progress of a pattern.

Patterns can evolve for forty-five minutes, a day, a week, month, or more. The pattern will grow to fill whatever time and space is available. In small spaces, patterns may be completed and rearranged in the same space for different outcomes. The patterns are never the same. In a large space with a long exhibition time, a pattern may continue to develop over several days or weeks before being disassembled back in to individual parts.