(gentle upbeat music) - We are at the Racine Art Museum here for the PEEPS Brand Art Exhibition.

This is the 17th iteration of the show.

We started off in 2010 as kind of a way to explore some more accessible ways of introducing the community's art into the museum.

(gentle upbeat music continues) It is by far the most popular thing we ever do.

We see tons of visitors each year.

They specifically come to visit the museum only because of the PEEPS Exhibition.

We saw a couple people that they specifically timed their family visits from California to Wisconsin so it would intersect with PEEPS.

(gentle upbeat music continues) It is wildly popular.

It's kind of unusual for a museum to be doing something like this 'cause you're working with such an unusual material, a candy, marshmallow candy.

That really kind of like, evens the playing field, I think, between professional artists and just kind of occasional crafters.

PEEPS are just inherently very iconic, whether you love 'em or hate 'em.

But you very much will recognize them.

Super cute, kind of inherently connected to the springtime.

We recognize how much life that the PEEPS candy brings to such like, dreary Wisconsin winters around this time.

That just kind of took on a life of its own.

People were instantly hooked.

(soft cheerful music) So when we first started the exhibition, we had it off in this smaller room that we call the staging room internally.

It's just kind of like a multipurpose flex space.

We never really had timing to put the PEEPS Exhibition into a permanent gallery.

So after years of people saying like, "You know, this isn't the greatest space for it," we finally took it to heart, really reevaluated our exhibition schedule, carved out some space so now this is in a permanent gallery space.

(bright easygoing music) This year, we're seeing a lot of works that are kind of responding to popular culture in some way or kind of famous artworks.

And I think there are three or four works that are inspired by the Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance.

Bunny, PEEPS Bunny.

It's a very easy pun to make there.

That is also kind of a lot of what you see in the show too, is a lot of just wordplay and puns.

Seeing how you can shoehorn the word peep into different kinda words.

You see a lot of works inspired by America's 250th anniversary this year.

Lots of movie references.

We were also able to commission an artist from Chicago named Andrea Jablonski.

She did an installation in the show that kind of coincides with the community's artwork where she reimagined popular sculptures as the PEEPS Bunny shape.

We've got a mix of a lot of artists from even just the local community, including some professional artists like Bill Reid.

He's a popular artist that we have in our collection.

We've got some artists like Debby Peck, who we've seen in some other exhibitions, and a lot of her works have been voted for the PEEPle's Choice Award.

(bright upbeat music) One thing that comes with this exhibition is a variety of awards that we present.

We reproduce a specific work in the show as a postcard, and then the artist gets some of those and those are sold in our museum store.

So we have the PEEPle's Choice Award.

So throughout the run of the show, everybody gets one vote per visit and then we tally that up and whoever has the most votes at the end gets the award for that.

The PEEPle's Choice Award winner get this really cute golden bunny statue in the PEEPS shape.

Different departments within the City of Racine created their own works.

Some of them were inspired by their own departments, like I know the Fire Department did one that was showcasing firefighters in action.

Like their IT Department did one about Mount Peepmore.

Again, love the puns that people are coming up with.

One of the largest goals for this exhibition is just to bring something lighthearted and more accessible to the community, so part of why we put together this show is to make ourselves a more welcoming space, invite the community in.

I've talked to people that have come here as children to see the show and now they're adults and they're bringing other family and other friends with.

It's just creating lifelong memories.

(bright upbeat music fades) - [Announcer] Thanks for watching The Arts Page.

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