Exhibiting Liveliness

An Essay by Felicia Cooper

A puppet’s liveliness is in its movement. From movement, comes their aliveness, their gestures, and their insistence on existence. When a puppet is in motion, both its performer and audience take part in a ritual of suspended disbelief and shared exercise in imagination. However, as in these museum-style exhibits, when a puppet is still, it tells a different story: often one of the tension of this potentiality and the clear lack of life from the puppet on display. In all three exhibits on display at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in 2025, however, there was an attention to process, design, and construction. Two of these were clearly intended for an audience of puppeteers visiting for the annual festival, while the other one was more broad and inviting to those who might be discovering puppetry for the first time. In each exhibit, we were able to admire the work on display, not only as an aesthetic delight but as a design and fabrication process.

In the Chicago Puppet Arts studio space in the Fine Arts Building, two exhibits were on display during the festival: Myra Su’s Lessons in Puppetry and puppets constructed by Chicago Puppet Arts for Drury Lane Theatre’s 2024/25 production of The Little Mermaid. Occupying their own respective rooms, these exhibits invited careful attention to design and process, offering  a peek into the work of both Su, a Chicago-based puppet artist, and the commissioned work of the host organization.

In Su’s show, surprises surrounded us in a room of shadow puppets, illustrations, crankies, and a taxidermied rat placed on several tables lining the walls of the room. Each was lit in ways to draw the eye specifically to the work at hand. As though poking through a well-curated storage closet with a strong flashlight, a sense of unearthing treasure prevailed. Su opted to guide the viewer through the work by illuminating specific areas with blue, green, and red light. 

The lessons named in the title of the exhibit encouraged playfulness, as visitors were encouraged to interact with the work by turning cranks, sliding levers, and shining flashlights, creating educational opportunities through play and exploration. This was an homage to the discovery inherent in puppetry design, realized in the exhibit and so clearly imagined by those encountering it. The tension between intentional design and intuitive exploration was a highlight in this exhibit, and that feeling  helped walk the viewer through the (often obscured) process of designing a puppet.

By the time I visited, several exhibits were no longer in working order, owing surely to the enthusiasm and joy that people felt at the invitation to play and discover how the grand effects of Su’s designs were achieved. Su is known for a keen shadow-puppetry eye but has also shared her experimental approach to the design process. In her work, there is a theme of asking her puppets to perform the impossible, while incorporating anachronistic technologies (bar codes, moiré animation, and taxidermy) as part of skill collection and design innovation. 

Each of the pieces in the exhibit had a short bit of wall text, illuminating either process or purpose, commission or exploration. One of the pieces used a kinegram technique, encouraging visitors to pull parallel lines across each other on an overhead projector, a surprising way of merging vintage moiré animation with vintage projection equipment. Another piece in the exhibit, a lantern, asked audience members to shine flashlights in various directions against the wall to reveal intricate details. Another piece featured splayed examples of paper animation puppets for a film, with detailed frames drawn out in the storyboard behind it. Finally, a few taxidermied rats positioned under blue light lay motionless next to a small sign advising us to create faux animal puppets instead. The interactivity and sense of play in this exhibit set it apart from most puppetry exhibits and allowed us to witness the puppet’s propensities and potentialities. 

The next exhibit, an overview of the puppets involved in Drury Lane Theatre’s recent stage production of The Little Mermaid, also featured insights into the design process. Puppets were suspended from the ceiling as though swimming through the watery world portrayed in the musical but were also grouped on the ground, leaned against walls, nestled in corners, and  displayed on shelves. The puppets included life-sized humanesque versions of Ariel, the titular mermaid, as well as her love interest Prince Eric, cartoonish birds, crabs, fish, and more. These were in a variety of styles, but most had some form of black-painted rod control. This production was inspired by coastal parades and used visible reeds and bamboo as the understructure for the majority of the puppets, with translucent fabric that allowed the structure to be visible. The aesthetic relied strongly upon nostalgia for the colorful 1989 Disney film, but the construction and textures of the puppets made them suitable for the stage. Caitlin McLeod and Zachary Sun designed the puppets, with Tom Lee listed as an associate puppet designer. 

This room was thoroughly filled with at least twenty puppets, a maximalist feast for the eyes. We were made aware of the kinetic potentiality within the puppets because of their lack of movement, which simultaneously allowed us to admire them as art objects and marvel at their construction. Luckily, Chicago Puppet Studio provided a promotional video of the performance, which contextualized the objects in front of us. Largely, the theatrical moments witnessed in the video utilized broad, swooping motions befitting the larger-than-life world built within the performance. To encounter this work and the attention paid to the design process was to appreciate these puppets on a new level.

Also adorning the walls were framed designs for the puppets, and the exhibit featured a binder of progress images that included a full-page list of the studio artists involved in their creations. In this, we could see the complex and layered processes that went into building this work. This is a fascinating take on the problem inherent in displaying the stillness of objects created to be witnessed in motion. Geared to a crowd already demonstrating their investment in puppetry as an art form by their attendance at the festival, this allowed us to think deeply about the process of artistic design and fabrication. 

Situated at the intersection of both praxis and the theory of puppetry, the exhibit Potential Energy at the Chicago Cultural Center, curated by Grace Needleman and Will Bishop, coordinated by Ashwaty Chennat and co-presented by the festival, featured puppets by Chicago artists spanning a wealth of styles and materials. Featured prominently in the room and in advertising for the exhibit was a life-size rhinoceros by KT Shivak—the puppet looked just barely docile enough to share a room with visitors. There were also hand puppets, shadow puppets, a mural, and other examples of work from Chicago-based artists working in puppetry, including the previously mentioned Myra Su, Tom Lee, and Caitlin McLeod. This exhibit was on display from December 21, 2024, to April 6, 2025, and included robust community programming, such as an Intro to Puppetry for BIPOC artists and puppet lovers led by Leah Lara, drop-in touch tours, and a closing puppet slam. There were tigers, T-Rexes, masks, and more. Hailed as an exhibit of potentialities, it was a striking and successful view of a wide range of puppetry. Often using familiar materials, these puppets allowed the viewers (who, in contrast to those visiting the other exhibits, may have been unfamiliar with this rich art form) to stretch their definitions of puppetry. 

In this exhibit, there were several protest puppets, including those recently used to call attention to the actions of the Israeli government in its occupation of Palestine. Standing about ten feet tall, these offered an example of puppetry reflecting and being used as a tool in social and political uprising. Controversy arose in January, when 27 alderpersons sent a letter authored by Alderwoman Debra Silverstein to Mayor Brandon Johnson demanding the removal of a particular puppet titled “US-Israel War Machine.” Silverstein called the puppet anti-Semitic in its criticism of Israel. The double-sided protest puppet shows a bloodied Uncle Sam on one side and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the other. Painted on the wood base are the words “child killers,” “Don’t look away,” and “murderers,” as well as depictions of missiles. “This puppet is a protest puppet that was used in protest actions in Chicago, protesting the war in Gaza, and it was created by local artists,” festival founder Blair Thomas said in an interview with ABC7 Chicago. 

A special meeting of the City Council’s Committee on Cultural Affairs, Special Events and Recreation was convened, during which the artists defended the puppet as a form of artistic expression and an example of the exercise of free speech. Aside from the puppet’s pointed political message, they maintained that removing the puppet would set a dangerous precedent for censorship by the City Council. During her testimony in front of the committee on February 4, 2025, Clinée Hedspeth, the Chicago Commissioner of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, stated that the artists were heard and that the work they created would not be silenced by one person. Because the exhibit was curated by a committee, she countered that a committee of artists and curators would need to be called upon in order to remove it in accordance with established city policy regarding controversial public artworks. 

The response from the puppetry community was broadly supportive of the artist: “To hear that there has been such an uproar about this puppet is shocking and honestly, a waste of everyone here’s time,” one resident said. “The demand to remove this puppet sets a dangerous precedent that Chicago elected officials can dictate which artwork is allowed to be displayed in our city and which is not, based on whether they agree with the art’s politics” (Schulte, February 4, 2025: 47 to 55 secs). Some changes were made to the exhibit allowing it to continue, including a sign that stated it contained “sensitive content,” but the puppet itself was not removed, although the placard identifying it was taken down. 

This points to the historical use of puppetry in social uprising: Because of puppetry’s ability to be of any size, its position as a populist art form, and its relationship to archetypes, it is a useful tool for amplifying political messages. This puppet is impossible to miss in a crowd; we can imagine that it was able to be designed and fabricated quickly in response to current events; and it is instantly recognizable. While we may not know immediately what the puppet is protesting, we understand that the image of a bloodied Uncle Sam represents nationalistic shame. While we may not immediately identify Netenyahu, we can recognize a man in a gray suit as being an authority figure. This is a successful use of archetypal imaging for the expression of a clear visual message. In this, the art featured is a successful use of puppetry. The puppet’s immediacy and clear material reality gives way to power: We trust what we can see and feel, this embodiment of protest helps us see and feel resistance, amplifying the voices of people who demand to be heard. We see this potential energy, even in its stillness.