The Custom Dinner Plate I Made in Kindergarten

MARCH 21, 2005

Children of the 1970s who read this site: Did any of you make plates like this in art class?

You drew a picture on a circular piece of opaque paper, and then your parents or your teacher sent the drawing off to a company that pressed the drawing into a plastic plate. A week or two after you sent off the drawing, the plate arrived in the mail. I ate off this plate every night for years:

To help the art historians who, decades from now, will be devoting themselves to analyzing the history and motivations behind my artistic output, I will record some background about this drawing—no, this “sculptured culinary tool.” I created this piece in 1976, when I was a seven-year-old kindergarten student. I was still flush with excitement from my recent trip to Australia with my family. There is a boastful, almost preening quality to this piece, as if I am trying to say, “Hey, look at me! I just went to AUSTRALIA! On a AIRPLANE!!!!!” Less-forgiving critics might use the words “sloppy” and “unrealistic” to describe, respectively, the colored line work and the questionable deployment of perspective; I prefer the terms “kinetic” and “imaginative.” Yes, it’s true, one could argue that my placement of my signature in the CENTER of the piece betrays some sort of narcissistic personality disorder, but I would argue that I was merely trying to save people from having to spend time figuring out who created the work. Why not be up front about it? I have never been one for willful obscurity, and this is evident even in my earliest works. 

Careful observers will notice that the top instance of “TWA” is spelled backwards. When I was working on this piece, I was so cocky about my ability to write upside down that I didn’t bother to sketch the letters in pencil before finalizing them with magic marker. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. This error will surely increase the potential value of this unusual, one-of-a-kind work of art. 

UPDATE: Apologies to future historians: I may have given the wrong date for this work. It seems that I must have created it in 1975, or possibly even 1974. I think it was 1975. My college friend Peter, who is the same age as I am, wrote to offer this observation: “Seven-year-old Kindergarten student? Was that some Indiana thing? You date the plate to 1976. Personally, in the 1975-76 school year, I was in the first grade, and in the 1976-77 year, the second grade. Art historians and Hearst-ologists may be trying to clear up the date/grade correspondence for years to come.” 

UPDATE II: Wait! Check this out! We have confirmation! In my files I found a notebook I kept during my Australia trip. This notebook proves that the Australia trip took place in February 1975, the month I turned six. The handwriting appears to be my mother’s, not mine. She must have served as the transcriptionist for my muse:

I can now say with great confidence that I created The TWA Plate sometime in March or April of 1975, soon after I turned six.