For one month this spring, a Sidwell kindergarten class experienced the presence of a unique work by the acclaimed artist On Kawara. What did they see?

Something was different when Denise Coffin’s kindergarteners walked into her classroom on Monday, March 31. Unbeknownst to them, a team of art professionals, faculty, and staff, had installed seven black and white paintings by the conceptual artist On Kawara on a wall over the weekend. Each painting showed a different date: Jan. 1 through Jan. 7, 1997. They were hung high and out of reach, at once striking in their appearance and easy to overlook.

The work, called “Pure Consciousness,” has graced the walls of 30 elementary schools around the world since 1998—from Turkey and Finland to Bhutan and Madagascar. Sidwell Friends is the second US school to host it. Kawara, who was born in Japan, lived in New York City from 1965 to his death in 2014. His works hang in museums and private collections around the world.

The idea behind the work is that students ages 4-6 should “live” with the paintings. A requirement of the installation is that teachers and other adults not draw attention to the paintings or ask the students about their reactions to them. If students ask for an explanation, adults are directed to encourage the children’s own, unfiltered impressions. It’s the experience with the work Kawara cared about most.

According to the foundation that oversees Kawara’s estate and works, “Pure Consciousness,” which was painted on the dates shown on the canvases, reflects the lessons that children at this age learn about fundamentals such as letters, numbers, and time. The consecutive dates stand as a counting exercise and the seven-day span represents a building block of the calendar. The paintings also illustrate size relations, as Kawara alternates between formats that differ by degree—slightly larger or smaller, darker or lighter. 

Lower School Principal Adele Paynter says the work epitomized the “spirit of whimsy, joy, and creativity,” that teachers try to create each day. “It is just the kind of experience we want for our students,” she added.

For Coffin, the direct experience students had with the work typified the self-guided educational experience Sidwell Friends seeks to create.

“Having this unmediated installation in the classroom where students were not given explanations or answers about why the paintings were here or what they meant provoked their own thinking, their own natural responses and ideas,” she said. “We often talk to the kids about silence and how silence is not simply a break between sentences but an important space in and of itself. Living with the paintings without explanation for a month was like a silence between sentences—an opportunity for kids to prepare their minds and open their hearts in an organic way.”

Only after the paintings were deinstalled on April 30 after their one-month residence and returned to New York City could the class finally talk about the seven rectangular canvases that had arrived mysteriously and left without notice. Coffin and her teaching assistant, Jesse Cresswell, reviewed photographs of the classroom with the students to discuss the experience, share ideas, and address lingering questions. They talked about seeing patterns, thinking about time, noticing how the classroom walls looked different, and wondering why the artist had chosen to use only shades of black and white.

Cresswell says she is grateful to have been part of the history of the work. “The children had so many wonders about Kawara’s processes—both the physical process of creating the paintings, and also his ideation. We laughed about the funny things the paintings might have ‘heard’ us say or ‘seen’ us do, and they wondered what the paintings had seen and felt in the other schools and if they brought anything to us without our being conscious of it.”