Phillips-at-home: Making Musical Maracas

Get craft with your recyclables! You can use water bottles and toilet-paper rolls to make musical maracas at home with your family. This project is fun, engaging, and accessible for all ages.

Young visitors showing off their wonderful creations! Photo credit: Joshua Navarro

WHAT YOU NEED:

  • Toilet paper rolls or water bottles (you can use both, or one or the other)
  • Beads or any dried food in your kitchen pantry, such as beans, pasta, or rice.
  • Decorative materials (colorful duct tape, tissue paper, scrapbook paper, pipe-cleaners, etc.)

SUGGESTED AGE:

  • 4 and up (possible for younger ages with adult supervision)

TIME FRAME: 

  • 30 minutes-1 hour

HOW TO BUILD A MARACA:

There are two easy ways to construct your musical maraca.

Option 1

Step 1: Clean, rinse and dry plastic water bottle. Any size bottle will work!

Step 2: Select beads or dried food for the inside (beads/food may be visible so think about the colors you want to choose)

Step 3: Pour beads/dried food into the water bottle

  • Tip: Use a piece of paper as a funnel to make this process easier and cleaner
  • Tip: Fill up halfway to allow room for beads to shake

Step 4: Close water bottle cap

Step 5: Decorate the outside of your maraca!

To further extend your project, create two maracas and attach a toilet paper roll in between to form a handle. Duct tape is recommended.

(Option 1 examples) Two decorative water bottle maracas. Photo: Hayley Prihoda

Option 1 examples

A large maraca with a toilet paper handle. Photo: Hayley Prihoda

Option 1 extended example

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Option 2 examples) A triangular maraca made out of a toilet paper roll (on left) and a rain stick made out of a paper towel roll (on right). Photo: Hayley Prihoda

Option 2 examples: A triangular maraca made out of a toilet paper roll (on left) and a rain stick made out of a paper towel roll (on right). All photos: Hayley Prihoda

Option 2

Step 1: Select a toilet paper roll or paper towel roll

  • Tip: A toilet paper roll will create a hand-held maraca; a paper towel roll will create a rain stick

Step 2: Pinch one end together and seal by stapling

Step 3:  Pour beads/dried food into the tube

Step 4: Close other end with staples

  • Tip: You can either pinch the edges together in the same direction as the other end or in the opposite direction to create a triangle shape (see photograph below)

Step 5: Decorate the outside of your maraca!

Re-purposing materials is a great way to save money, think creatively and reduce waste!

Riffs and Relations: Mequitta Ahuja

Artist Mequitta Ahuja discusses her work Xpect, which premiered in Riffs in Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, on view at The Phillips Collection through May 24.

Two images: Left: Mequitta Ahuja, Le Damn, colored pencil sketch; Right: Le Damn, 2018, Oil on canvas, 80 x 84 in.

Left: Mequitta Ahuja, Le Damn, colored pencil sketch; Right: Le Damn, 2018, Oil on canvas, 80 x 84 in.

Because of the historical context they provide, museums like The Phillips Collection give artworks a feeling of permanence. The things you encounter came before you and will be there for future generations.

Or not.

In 2017, Adrienne Childs, guest curator of Riffs and Relations wrote me in an e-mail, “At this point I am at the proposal stage, and I have no clue if this will fly.” Because I had offered to make a new painting for the show, when Adrienne’s proposal was accepted, my participation was still in question. Adrienne wrote: “Because [the painting] does not exist at this point, the Phillips can’t really put it on the final checklist.” In an attempt to tip the scale in my favor, I made two paintings. Everyone likes a choice.

Image of Mequitta Ahuja's painting Le Damn Revisited

Mequitta Ahuja, Le Damn Revisited, 2018, Oil on canvas, 84 x 72 in., Courtesy of the artist

Image of Mequitta Ahuja's painting Xpect

Mequitta Ahuja, Xpect, 2018, Oil on canvas, 84 x 72 in., Courtesy of the artist

That sense of inevitability that one feels in museums and other sites of history is a fiction. Having a painting of mine hang on the walls of The Phillips Collection was as unlikely and tenuous as was the birth of my son, whom I regularly describe as a miracle.

In both paintings Le Damn Revisited and Xpect, I chronicle my journey to motherhood. The gray-scale painting within the painting is my rebuttal to Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Picasso’s painting is about the threat and allure of sex. Picasso presents woman—her body and her seduction—as an embodiment of that tension. I, too, address the threatening aspect of sex, but from a woman’s point of view. In my rebuttal to the Picasso, I depict my range of feelings from determination to despair throughout my process of trying to conceive. In Xpect and Les Damn Revisited I conclude that story with a declaration and celebration of my pregnancy.

Far from inevitable, holding my baby in front of my painting Xpect at The Phillips Collection feels magical and improbable. None of this was supposed to happen. We did it.

Photograph of Mequitta Ahuja holding her son in front of her painting Xpect

Mequitta Ahuja and her son at The Phillips Collection, February 2020. Photo: Rhiannon Newman

Meet Anne Taylor Brittingham

Meet our new Director of Learning and Education Strategies Anne Taylor Brittingham. Anne oversees program development, in-gallery interpretation, and adult, teacher, and PK12 initiatives.

Photo of Anne Taylor Brittingham

Anne Taylor Brittingham with Alma Thomas’s Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers (1968)

Tell us about yourself!
I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. I was a Classical Studies major at Wake Forest University and got my MA in Art History from the University of Virginia. I fell in love with art history when I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, in college. I discovered museum education through an internship in the education department of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts the summer before my senior year of college. That internship completely transformed my career trajectory. After grad school, I taught English at a high school in Thessaloniki, Greece, and spent two summers working on an archaeological dig in Aidone, Sicily. My first museum job was as a Gallery Teacher at the J. Paul Getty Museum. From there I went to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (now Frist Art Museum) in Nashville as Curator of Interpretation, then to the Corcoran Gallery of Art as Director of Interpretation, and then to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville as Director of Learning and Community Outreach and then Chief Engagement Officer.

What excites you about working at The Phillips Collection? What do you think makes the Phillips unique?
I’m so excited to be back in DC working with a collection I love! The structure of the Education and Community Engagement department is really innovative and provides so many opportunities for collaboration and growth both within the museum and out in the community. I love the size of the museum, think the collection is so special, and I am so impressed with the education department and the work they’ve been doing.

What project are you most interested in working on?
I’m so excited to partner with Nehemiah (Director of Community Engagement) in thinking about how a museum can be relevant across the DC metropolitan area and can be a model for how a museum creates the structure to enhttp://blog.phillipscollection.org/2020/03/03/meet-nehemiah-dixon/sure its greatest impact in the community. Nehemiah has done such amazing things and is so well-connected in the DC community. I can’t wait to start working together. I’m also excited to join the education team and think strategically about how we can build capacity and expand the museum’s reach with PK12, families, and adult audiences. And finally, I think the museum’s presence at THEARC and its partnership with the University of Maryland offers unlimited possibilities to redefine what a museum can be and what it can do.

Why do you think arts education is important?
I think arts education teaches people how to look closely, think critically, and take risks. It also lets us hear and understand different opinions and viewpoints. I have had amazing experiences with students and adults in front of works of art. Even when the art is unfamiliar, I love when it makes people instantly curious. The pull toward works of art can be just as strong as those forces that keep us from opening up and talking about sensitive issues. The artwork can become a vehicle to carry us through important conversations about a whole range of contemporary issues. In a museum education department, we can create experiences that are real, engaging, hands on, and personally and socially meaningful.

What is your favorite artist/artwork at the Phillips and why?
Alma Thomas’s Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers (1968). I love the rhythm, pattern, and color of this painting and how it makes me feel when I stand in front of it. I love Alma Thomas’s biography—her work as an educator in DC and then after retiring from teaching, devoting herself full-time to painting at the age of 68. At 80, she was still innovating! When she spoke to the New York Times at the opening of exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1972, she said: “When I was a little girl in Columbus, there were things we could do and things we couldn’t. One of the things we couldn’t do was go into museums, let alone think of hanging our pictures there. My, times have changed. Just look at me now.” Alma Thomas shows us how far we’ve come, but also how much farther we can go. She shows us the power of museums to change what we see and how we see the world in which we are living.  

Tell us a fun fact about yourself. 
I finished in second place to an Olympic gold medalist in swimming . . . when we were 11 years old!