Entertaining a child can often be a lopsided proposition. If you’re hoping to find a little something in it for you, Walter Wick’s fanciful I Spy series can help. His books are packed with entrancing photographic illustrations—a candy-colored metropolis, a spooky medieval castle—in which objects are so cleverly camouflaged that adults and kids enjoy “spying” them.
Wick’s artistry is now on display in I SPY! Walter Wick’s Hidden Wonders at the Norman Rockwell Museum through October 26. (The series also features text by Jean Marzollo, M.A.T. ’65.) The museum celebrates Rockwell’s work but also the broader impact of visual culture. See Wick’s dioramas, optical illusions, and puzzles, along with a video about his creative process. At its core, Wick’s work is about world-building. At his Miami studio, he constructs model sets, which he then photographs. Rockwell, too, devised meticulously staged scenes that he photographed. Those images became the basis for his paintings of “real life.” Such layering of curated visual culture and blurring perceptions of reality—using the ordinary objects and people that animate our lives—forces us, playfully, to keep seeing things anew.
