'War Toys: Ukraine' shows the serious side of play at The Strong 

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For a dozen years, photographer Brian McCarty has been traveling to war zones to sit through art therapy sessions with children, typically younger than 12, as they make drawings of their experiences, which he then reenacts in photographs of toys he has staged in the places of conflict. His work gives dimensionality to the kids’ anecdotes while preserving a sense of their innocent understanding of the situations. McCarty raises funds to travel and present the sobering images as well as his mission.

“It's a little pie in the sky, but the hope is to bring about a more peaceful world by invoking empathy, by reducing some of the biases, the xenophobia, the racism, all the things that separate us,” McCarty said. “When you’re looking at toys, it eliminates all that. It’s easier to see, “Oh, that could be me, or that could be my kid.”

McCarty’s project is currently on display at The Strong Museum of Play in “War Toys: Ukraine.”

At the museum, a wide hallway that leads to the museum’s great atrium is lined with board-mounted photographs of Ukrainian kids’ drawings, paired with McCarty’s photographic interpretation of each. They’re accompanied by curatorial texts that identify the children by name, age, and provide context about their experiences with the conflict.


Rochester is home to refugees of many global conflicts, including the current one in Ukraine. All of the curatorial text is printed in both English and Ukrainian.

“To be able to offer an exhibit like this to an important community is a vital part of our mission,” said The Strong’s vice president of exhibits, Jon-Paul Dyson. “Play is so important in terms of allowing us to cope with everything the world throws at us. And this is a way to highlight how it is even more true for people going through a traumatic event like war.”

The drawings and photographs depict bombed out buildings, barrier walls, and checkpoints mixed in with tanks, planes, missiles, mortar shells, soldiers, and dead bodies.

Everywhere there’s disruption, destruction, and death. Artem, 11, drew his destroyed school with a Russian jet flying away. Five-year-old Yehor’s drawing shows his grandparents running from their house, which is being bombed. Another image, by six-year-old Iryna, imagines her lost cat waiting for her outside of a burning house.

Work from “War Toys” has been spotlighted on CNN and displayed internationally. This is the first time it has been exhibited at a major institution.

McCarty has also worked with kids in conflict zones across the globe, including Columbia, Uganda, South Sudan, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. There, McCarty observed an art therapy session with kids at the Spafford Children’s Center in East Jerusalem.

“My heart sank as I watched a little girl quietly, intensely coloring in pools of blood,” McCarty said to a Santa Monica audience during his 2012 TEDx presentation about his project. “Violence was everywhere, in each one of their drawings.”


Following art therapy sessions, McCarty studies the drawings the children made and then visits local markets to buy toys, using them to recreate the images in photographs that he stages, as often as possible, in the actual places that they happened. Cartoonish toys reenact what the kids have seen against a backdrop of actual rubble, at times with real people and war vehicles seen in the backgrounds.

“The goal of the project is to articulate children’s accounts of war using principles of play and art therapy,” McCarty said. “In practice, children essentially act as art directors, showing me what they’ve experienced.”

McCarty, 49, is based in Los Angeles, but will travel anywhere for this work, because children everywhere feel the pain of bombardment, displacement, injury, and death. His work speaks to an ever-topical issue, giving voice to perspectives on war that are, by and large, unheard.

McCarty works with professional child and art therapists, including Dr. Judith Rubin, author of seminal books on child art therapy and an original cast member of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.”

“Though young children may be aware of what’s happening around them, they often lack the communication skills to comment and tell you what they’ve seen and felt,” he said.

In McCarty’s experience, that’s especially true of children who have been traumatized. In extreme cases, he says, they can lose the ability to speak altogether. “Play and art are how you can unlock their experiences and begin the process of healing and understanding.”


McCarty’s roots are in commercial toy photography, which he began in the ’90s. He has worked for Mattel Toys and his commercial portfolio includes commissioned work for Disney, MTV, Hasbro, Rockstar Games, Kidrobot, and Cartoon Network.

McCarty began his use of toys to interpret the experience of war in 1996 when he was invited to be part of an exhibition In Croatia, soon after its more than 5-year war for independence had concluded.

“Given the postwar setting, I thought about my father's experiences in Vietnam and his utter reluctance to talk about it,” McCarty said. “I told him, ‘Hey, I'd really love to understand your stories better.’”

When his father declined, McCarty turned to letters his father wrote home to his mom, in which he opened up about the first time he was shot at and participating in the Tet Offensive.

“I reenacted those moments with an off-the-shelf 1960s-era G.I. Joe,” he said. “And that was the seed of the idea of using toys as a way to make war accessible, especially for folks who haven’t experienced it.

McCarty soon learned about play therapy and art therapy. “And somewhere in all of that,” he said, “the idea of working with children and inviting them to collaborate, to tell their stories and to advocate on their behalf was born.”

Since its early days, McCarty’s efforts have expanded beyond showing war through the eyes of kids to an attempt to change the way kids play war games around the world. He’s doing this by working with manufacturers of plastic army men to include a new set of characters — an aid worker, a frontline rescuer, and a combat photojournalist — and with Nashra Balagamwala has co-developed a board game called “Evac Ops” which aims to teach children about the vital work of noncombatants in war.

The exhibition at The Strong also includes a display of Evac Ops and the new figures, along with information about the accompanying app that teaches kids how to play it.

“The things I’ve seen have been educational, to say the least,” McCarty said in his TEDx talk. “And there’s unfortunately no shortage of war zones to choose from. By the time this project is done, I want to present a global perspective on war from the children living in its day-to-day reality.”

At The Strong, amid the scenes of being under siege and fighting back, there are little pleas for safety and peace that emerge in images of hope.

That manifests as a simple curved line, a dome covering a house in a drawing by Anton, age seven. McCarty’s accompanying image depicts a glass bowl shielding a colorful toy house, pristine compared to the wrecked real one in the background.

“I have almost the exact same photo from Israel,” McCarty said. “It's a common hope that we've seen from a lot of kids — there was a girl from Syria who was a lone survivor in her family. And she drew herself in this magical shield, in a field of ash.”

“War Toys: Ukraine” is on view through March 16 at The Strong.

Rebecca Rafferty is an arts writer at CITY. She can be reached at [email protected].