Earlier this year, I got the opportunity to interview the winners of the 2024 Todd Samara Art Fund Award: Kaya Keller and Erin Dougherty. They won the $1,500 prize with the promise of creating and manning the Roadside Rat Museum, a mobile museum that’s both intended to be shaped like a rat and also to exhibit rat-themed artwork. The Roadside Rat Museum is envisioned to be a community-focused project, promising rat-themed workshops and a “give-a-rat, take-a-rat” system.

I met the two women at Erin’s studio to learn more about this project and ask them various pressing questions that not just I, but several local artists are curious about when it comes to such a funny idea. Kaya and Erin have garnered a lot of interest and curiosity from people in this community, so it was time to learn more about them and their upcoming museum.

Kaya and Erin have a lot of parallels in their education. Both of them are Kingston High School alumni, were members of PUGG (now the MKAD Youth Workforce Program) and graduated from the SUNY New Paltz sculpture program. Erin currently works at Bard College as a studio workshop manager, giving students demonstrations of power tools. Erin is a multimedia artist who wants to explore various avenues, like fiber and metalwork, to find her way in her artistic endeavors. Kaya is a sculptor fascinated with the concept of “girliness,” playing with bright pink and glittery things. Her senior thesis consisted of “Fool’s Kits,” boxes full of various inspiring items, including a container of glitter you’re meant to spread somewhere and then sweep back up to collect things inside the glitter while leaving some glitter behind.

Erin explained the backstory behind the idea. “I went to Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, and one of the things out there is the Salt & Pepper Shaker Museum. It’s like, so incredible, because it’s like 20,000-plus pairs of shakers. There’s all of these weird roadside attractions and collections of things that are just things from someone’s house that they open up to the public, and it was really interesting to think: ‘What is a museum?’ Because this is just a bunch of salt and pepper shakers that somebody took out of their house and made a storefront that people can visit. I thought that was really interesting, and I thought of Kaya, and Kaya’s rats, and how fun Kaya’s work is. I thought ‘Oh my god, Kaya, we should do a rat museum!’”

I had to ask Kaya about her apparent association with rats. “I don’t have any real connection to rats. People always ask me if I have pet rats, but no. I don’t really care about rats. A lot of my work revolves around celebrating things that aren’t really celebrated and the defiant nature of being joyful and what that looks like. So I use a lot of pink and glitter, a lot of gaudy, girly, childish materials because I think they’re super fun and worthy of being celebrated. Also, I got into the idea of rats and the idea that they’re pests. The idea that a pest could be celebrated and joyful and important was super fun to me, so I started making rat art.”

I asked them what their basic description of the Roadside Rat Museum would be, as if explaining it to someone who didn’t know what a rat or a museum even was. Erin described it as, “A small home for dozens of rats,” to which Kaya added, “It’ll be like a roadside shrine to rats.”

A large part of the Roadside Rat Museum’s philosophy is pushing the boundaries of what counts as a museum, and what’s deserving of celebration. “[Rats] have become personal symbolism,” Kaya explained. “A symbol of celebration in the face of what is worthy of celebration,” Erin added. She went on to say, “What’s worthy of celebration is a built-in component of the Rat Museum. As artists, ‘what does it mean to get into a museum’ and ‘who is represented in a museum,’ are huge conversations that go on forever and ever in art. And you know, we’re being like, one: this is the objectively funniest combination of things ever — rats, in a museum. And two: we’re evaluating who gets to be celebrated and what and how.”

“Apparently if you pitch the idea of a rat museum enough, eventually somebody will say yes,” Erin said in reference to their winning of the Todd Samara Art Fund Award. I expressed that people really do want to see offbeat and humorous things in the world. “We were nobody’s first pick,” Kaya said, “But we were something that everyone wanted to see, so they all agreed on it.” “It’s a very new idea that we’re still figuring out,” Erin explained, “We were like, this is a silly idea. What if we just went for this? We were not expecting to get it, we thought it would be so funny if we actually got it. But we thought it would be even funnier if we didn’t get, and having the panel read this insane proposal. Then we got it, and we get to make this real. Everyone at the MKAD Soiree was like, ‘How do I get involved?’ and we said, ‘We’ll let you know!’ We just didn’t get that far.”

I then asked them what they thought people needed to know about the Roadside Rat Museum. “First, that you can participate in it,” Erin explained. She showed me the expanse of their blueprints set upon the wall of her studio. There was extensive evidence of brainstorming, full of different ideas and groundwork for the project’s possibilities. “It’s open to community participation, which was a unique component to the MKAD Youth Workforce and New Paltz sculpture. They have such a big emphasis on community engagement and working with the community. We both were able to work with Whoop-Dee-Doo too, so we’ve been around people who do a lot of community engagement and getting a lot of people who aren’t artists or interested in art to come be a part of things. We also want people to know that they can make rats and put them in the museum,” Erin continued, “2-D rats, 3-D rats, but not living rats. If you have rats, we’ll take them. You can be a part of a celebratory moment with this super objectively weird thing.”

Kaya went on to elaborate more on the extent to which they are willing to accept rats. “We are looking for artist-made rats, anyone-made rats, but please no mice or other rodents. But if anyone finds a weird rat thing at the thrift store and wants to buy it for 50 cents and give it to us, we’ll take that. The main focus is definitely handmade rat items, whether that’s a four-year-old’s drawn picture of a rat or a super in-depth art piece about rats that’s taken hours, we want anything like that and everything in between.”

I asked them if they’re going to be particular about whether a submission is a rat or a mouse, since it can often be difficult to tell. “We don’t want people to bring us their Mickey Mouse collections or dead rats,” Erin explained, “but since the handmade intention is important, if you make a rat and it looks more like a mouse, and you made it with the intention of making a rat and you had a fun time making it, we will still take it. But if someone comes in with, like, Mickey Mouse mugs or cat toys, that’s maybe not getting taken. We’ll take abstract, rat-inspired art.” Kaya added: “Or if you have a rat and that rat makes art.”

I asked them if seeing people’s excitement for this project after it won the award has given them new hope or perspective on general openness to silly and fun ideas. “I think so,” They both said. “We got a lot more interest at the Soiree than I was expecting,” Erin shared, “People kept coming up to ask how they can get involved and be a part of the rat museum and saying how much they love it. And we were like, ‘Oh, really?!’ I was expecting a lot more side-eyes and people wanting us to explain why. I had assumed the expectation for recipients of the Todd Samara Art Fund Award were things of a more professional or serious nature, so I’m also finding a lot of new hope for lighthearted projects having a place here in Kingston.”

“We feel like we got pranked,” Erin said, “We weren’t ready for the amount of people interested in it.”

I told them how most publications I’ve read about the Roadside Rat Museum described both Kaya and Erin as “up-and-coming artists,” which they had a laugh over. “I think the term we put on our proposal was emerging artists,” Erin explained, “Since you graduate and try to find your footing, so that’s the term we learned. Not a mid-career professional yet, still figuring it out.”

When asked about their initial ideas for what the Roadside Rat Museum will look like, Kaya replied with, “We’re thinking something six-by-eight-by-six, something around that scale. Kind of a shack, vaguely rat-shaped with tails and ears and maybe a nose. Otherwise building-shaped.” Erin added, “We could go all the way with making it look like a rat. You know, like the Soapbox Derby and their crazy designs, or theme park structures. We’re still working on it but it will still, in some regard, look like a rat.”

I asked them about their feelings towards the Todd Samara Art Fund Award, to which Erin replied, “I think it’s a great way of honoring his memory. After he passed, instead of hoarding all of that work it was sold and that’s how the fund was made.” Kaya then described her own relationship with the award, which brought everything full circle, “When I was at PUGG, we actually worked at that auction. I didn’t make the connection until we were applying for this, but yeah, I was there. As PUGGs we moved the art around and were watching it happen. It was pretty cool to remember that and realize that, after being a part of PUGG and DRAW and MKAD, we get to be on the other end of it.” Erin added, “It’s definitely special to support artists in the community in the wake of someone’s passing. I think that’s always really powerful to do. To get this award, it feels like we’re now in another professional world. It’s a support, in a way.”

With how much the idea of museums and their limits were brought into question throughout this project and their philosophy surrounding it, I had to ask both Erin and Kaya what their own personal definitions of a “museum” were. “I think that’s what I’m figuring out through this project,” Erin said. “I worked at the Dorsky museum at New Paltz and I spent a lot of time in the museum. Now I work at Bard and we have a gallery space for student work. It’s interesting … It’s an ongoing thought process. We think of art museums, but there are museums that aren’t art like science and history museums.”

Said Kaya, “I like to think about children’s museums too, because you go in there and you play and you touch stuff. When you think of museums, you think: ‘Don’t touch it, just look at it,’ but in children's museums you could splash around in a water table for an hour.” Erin then said, “I think museums are a place for learning and exposure. Unlike galleries, they’re not meant to present work to sell off the walls. The intention is to celebrate and have that space for sharing.” Kaya then went on to say, “In school they would always ask for the ‘juicy question,’ a big thesis question that you couldn’t already know the answer to. I think, ‘What’s allowed to be a museum, and who gets to decide that?’ is my thesis question here.”

With that, I had learned the answer to every pressing question I had about the Roadside Rat Museum. I had gone in with such curiosity about this project, its origins, and the public reception to it. I left the studio thankful for the opportunity and bundles of answers I now carried with me. While the Roadside Rat Museum remains a consistently growing and developing idea, it is so striking and successful in concept that it’s being fully realized and created for our own benefit here in Kingston. I hope you stay tuned and stay excited for this wonderful addition to our town, being invented by two incredibly imaginative local artists.