Mika Rottenberg was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1976, but her family moved to Israel the following year. She eventually headed to New York in 2000 to complete her education at the city's School of Visual Arts, ultimately achieving a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University in 2004. In the years that followed, her thought-provoking, women-centric artworks earned her prestigious solo exhibitions from Berlin to Beijing, Miami to London, and in 2022, at Hauser & Wirth's Los Angeles gallery - not long after H&W announced worldwide representation of her work in 2019.

Squeezed between those dates, Hauser & Wirth also launched the venerable Education Lab project at their gallery in Menorca, Spain in 2021, followed by a similar program at their Downtown Los Angeles space in 2022.

(Images courtesy of Hauser & Wirth)

By 2023 the Menorca Education Lab was hosting 1500 students per year, with the intention of allowing curious young minds the opportunity to directly engage with art, artists and the spark of new ideas that nearly always comes with that. This video, filmed there on August 4, 2025, perfectly exemplifies that engagement - with a group of six- and seven-year-old children posing some very interesting and surprisingly astute questions to Ms. Rottenberg, regarding her exhibition 'Vibrant Matter', which was on view at the gallery through October 2025.

One student straightforwardly asks her, "What is art to you?" She then explains, "Art can be many things. It's like a language you invent." Another inquires, "Do you like your job?" "I love it!, she replies enthusiastically. (After all, how could she not love her job as a highly acclaimed artist, right?)

It's an exchange that surely reminds us that children not only have a natural inquisitiveness, but also a keenness of perception that they are not always given enough credit for.

Please remember to revisit the 'Kids + Art' Content pages of tigernoodles often, for ongoing coverage of Hauser & Wirth's Education Lab programs.