These are just a few of the many, MANY faces artist Oleg Tselkov painted and each face he made was usually in bright colors and misshapen. Take a look at these faces here. How do you think they are feeling?

What do you think? Is Red Monster Dog a scary or silly little creature? Does it want to bite you or play with you? The artist made it out of clay and added little clues to suggest this little pup definitely has a sweet side. The artist, Robert Cooke, was a teacher at Rutgers University and liked to use different types of materials in his artwork.

Look closely and you can see the little horns sprouting from the head of this devil. He kind of looks like someone who would steal a nose, doesn’t he? Mark Antokolsky, who sculpted this, was the first ever Jewish person to be accepted into the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia and his sculptures became famous all over the world.

Okay, so that’s not really George Washington the woman is painting, but it does kind of look like him, right? During this time in Europe, it was pretty popular for men to wear white powdered wigs. They were said to help cover up baldness AND stop lice.

Loïe Fuller was an American dancer who became famous for dancing in the cabarets and music halls of Paris. Her trademark was her long flowing skirt which swirled around her, often with special lighting effects. Many artists were inspired to capture her unique dancing in their work.

What do you think when you see this guy? Does he look brave or mean? Does he look friendly or cranky? While many portraits are made of actual people, it is believed that the man in this portrait was not a real person but that the artist, Merry-Joseph Blondel, made it so he could practice painting different emotions on faces.

Is the sun setting or rising in this painting? Is the shepherd walking towards us or away from us? The shadows under the trees give a hazy view of the shepherd and all of the little sheep around him. The lack of detail in the figures and playing with the light is meant to create a feeling in the person looking at the painting. How does it make you feel?

George Segal lived most of his life in South Brunswick, New Jersey, not far from the Zimmerli, but now his sculptures can be seen around the world! Most of his sculptures of people were casted, meaning that he applied plaster directly to the model (an idea he got from new plaster bandages developed at Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick), then let it dry to capture their body as it was in real life. Segal didn’t use a lot of colors; instead he would pick just one — like this bright red! — to paint his sculptures. This incredible acrobat stretches 8 feet tall and shows that art doesn’t just have to be on the walls — it can hang from ceilings, too.

Adolphe Léon Willette was a French artist whose works were often illustrations for posters or magazines. And while the lady in the green dress is the hero of our story, Willette’s real subject of this painting is the black cat, or “chat noir” in French, which was the name of a famous nightclub in Paris where a stained-glass window version of this painting could be seen.

Not all art is actual, REAL things - for example, this painting by Nikolai Vechtomov. Instead, the painting is meant to be symbolic — using shapes and figures to represent a real object. Vechtomov was in fact part of a group of artists who fought against the use of realism in artwork.

What do you see when you look at this painting? Can you notice any shapes that look familiar? Or does it just look like a bunch of paint thrown at the canvas? Vincent Pepi, the artist who created this painting, is believed to be using a technique called surrealist automatism. That’s a fancy way of saying painting without thinking about it. Instead of focusing really hard about what you want to paint and how you should be painting it, this is a free style of painting that lets your unconscious mind take over for you.

This artist Micah Williams actually lived close to where the Zimmerli stands now in New Brunswick, NJ, where he worked as a portrait painter. For this job, he would go to people’s homes to paint or draw them. Unlike today where we can take dozens of portraits a day on our phones, back then, portraits were something that were very unique and special. People would have had them done only once or twice in their lives, and that was only if you could afford to hire an artist like Micah.

Have you ever been to a fair or a boardwalk and seen the caricature artists? A caricature is a drawing that looks like a person but emphasizes one of their features. (So, if you have a really big nose, for example, the artist making a caricature would make it even bigger!) That’s exactly what Honoré Daumier did, particularly of politicians in France, where he lived. This man with the rather large nose here is Jacques Lefèbvre, a politician and banker.

Any surface can become a canvas for a painting. For artist Ivan Chuikov, that included pieces of wood, glass, mirrors, and school chalkboards. This piece is one of a series of windows that he made on wood.

Are you maybe looking at this and wondering, “How is a door a work of art?” Artist Mikhail Roginsky was a nonconformist artist in what is now Russia, where he challenged strict rules of what the government said art was supposed to look like. He used the things around him, including items you see everyday — like a simple wood door — to inspire his artwork and push back at those rules.

The artwork of Alexander Kosolapov often reflects a sense of humor. Along with everyday objects like this doorbell, some of his most famous pieces use iconic symbols from American culture, like Mickey Mouse, Coca Cola, and even McDonald’s, that were not available to most Russians during the Soviet Union.

Okay, so this nose does not actually belong to the screaming lady in the story and it was certainly not stolen from her face by a little devil in the museum. But it is hanging on the wall of the Zimmerli Art Museum and it was made by artist Leonid Sokov, who lived in a country that no longer exists called the Soviet Union. Why do you think he chose to make a sculpture of just a nose?

Take a close look at this piece of art. Can you guess what that’s made of? It’s not clay or ceramic. It’s ... GLASS. As a French artist, Amalric Walter would tell you that it is actually “pâte- de-verre”, which is French for “paste of glass”. Rumor has it that if he wasn’t happy with the way one of his glass pieces turned out, he would throw it against a wall!

Now, you might be thinking, “Who paints dead fish?!” Well, William Merritt Chase did and he did it quite often, in fact. He’d go to the local fish market and buy a fish, run quickly back to his studio to paint it before it went bad (and smelly). One of his talents included painting realistic metal — like there was an actual metal plate in the painting. Chase was also a really great art teacher and opened a school which later became the famous Parsons School of Design in New York.

Severin Roesen was famous for his paintings of beautiful arrangements of flowers and fruit that looked good enough to eat. These types of paintings are called "still lifes," because they focus on objects that don't move (so no people, for example). Roesen moved to the United States from what is now Germany, where he was trained to paint on porcelain plates, teacups, and other small fancy things. This required great attention to detail, which he continued to capture in his bigger paintings like this.

The Zimmerli loves when kids visit - in fact, they have a special room of art especially for kids to enjoy, which you can see behind the puppies. These adorable little puppies were as part of an exhibition of illustrations of cats and dogs from children’s books. For the book Puppies, artist Art Seiden used a special kind of watercolor paint to help him add lots of details of the dogs he created into his paintings, so they would look very realistic - almost like you could feel their fur!

This may be one of the oldest pieces of art in the museum. It’s from ancient Egypt and it is the top of a jar. But not just any old jar — it’s a canopic jar, which is where the Egyptians put important organs of the body, like the heart, liver, and lungs, of a person that had died and was being mummified. The Egyptians believed they would take these organs with them into the afterlife.