50th Children's October Salon - The Art of Creation

The exhibition will be opened by: Sreto Bošnjak, Art Historian, The founder of The Salon
Curators of the exhibition: Angelina Folgić Korjak, Museum Advisor and Jelena Knežević, Curator

This year the Children’s October Salon of the Museum of Applied Art is celebrating a great jubilee – five decades of existence. This continual annual exhibition represents a special form of work with the young and is in many ways unique in our environment. At the time of its establishment as a pioneering venture of the Museum and art educators in schools, it started as a project that had multiple goals. The intention was to enrich art pedagogy with the field of applied art and make teaching contents diverse and of higher quality. The Museum had the intention to achieve continuous cooperation with art teachers and students in order that the knowledge and practice of applied art enriched forms of work planned in the curriculum. Launching a permanent museum exhibition event we tried to develop, in children and the young, the child’s creative skills through art work and understanding of art values. Thanks to the constant contact with the museum experts and eminent artists and pedagogues in the field of applied art the values pursued in the work with the youngest population were established. The cooperation with art teachers, educators, applied artists and professors of the Faculty of Applied Art has enabled contemporary experiences, their acceptance and testing in school practice. The high standard of art education with the respect of the child’s personality has spanned across a large number of generations and enabled a remarkable experience in the first encounter of children with art and creativity.

Angelina Folgić Korjak, Museum Advisor

This year’s salon has a general theme whose name is the Art of Creation and it is dedicated to the same basic task that the Children’s October Salon has been trying to achieve for years, and that is how to bring closer to children the art of creation, and to the professional and general population phenomenology of children’s expression and approach to art.

The art of creation is what has brought together generations of participants with the institution of the Museum of Applied Art, which is why we have decided to dedicate the 50th anniversary of the Salon to that very theme.

In this year’s opening we have received more than three thousand works from different institutions, schools, kindergartens and private studios for children aged 5 to 15, from Serbia, the Republic of Srpska and Montenegro. Among the participants there are those who will appear again at the Salon, but there are also new ones who will exhibit for the first time, which is a great pleasure for themselves, as well as for the organizers of the exhibition. Due to the large number of participants, the Selection Committee have chosen 370 works for the exhibition, although the number of quality works that have deserved to be displayed is certainly higher.

Jelena Knežević, Curator

The text about 50^th Children’s October Salon can be downloaded as PDF file:

50th Children’s October Salon