II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

This is a workshop in which we will introduce the Project The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education. We will focus on the archive that is being constructed and strategies to work with and against this archive. We will mobilize archival materialities and work through some questions with the participants: How was the creative child constructed within western arts educational discourses at the intersection of discourses on race, class, gender, and ableism? Which subject positions are being mobilized? What are the colonialities we can name and deconstruct?

This article from Louise Maitland is based on comparing the western child with the ‘primitive’. The illustrations in the article are “traced copies of the original drawings”. Maitland affirms what, by the end of the 19th century, became a common argument among western ‘white’ educators, psychologists, and art educators: “On comparing the drawings of primitive races with those of children, we find that they possess many points of interest in common.

This book was submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature at the University of Chicago by the candidate Lilla Estelle Appleton to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. As the title makes evident, the study is made through the equivalence of the child with the ‘savage’, simultaneously making those so-called ‘adult savages’ comparable to the child.

From the 1870s onwards, children’s drawings started to be systematically collected and analyzed by child psychologists to study the child’s mental growth process. Drawing as an instrument to study the child’s mind soon created an equivalence between what the child was (the drawings mirroring her mental processes) and what she should become. By the end of the 19th century, Corrado Ricci, in Italy, collected more than one thousand drawings.

This is a text from a conference given at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris by Ernest Hamy, who was the first director of the Ethnographic Museum of Trocadéro. Hamy's thought dwells on the comparison of children's drawings and 'savage' drawings. 

The Education Department at MOMA was directed by the artist and art educator Victor D'Amico. D'Amico traveled through the United States to know art education programs in schools, and has worked previously in settlement houses in New York. D'Amico also passed time at the Black Mountain College. The Children's Art Carnival and Through the Enchanted Gate were two of the most important and experimental programs he created at MOMA. Both programs started from the conviction that children were naturally creative and should be left free from adult interference to develop their creativity.

Victor D'Amico was the Director of the Department of Education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1937. D'Amico was an artist and art educator influenced by John Dewey's child-centered pedagogy. For him, creativity should prepare the child to live in a democratic society. At MOMA, D'Amico created the Children's Art Carnival, a program for young children from 1942 (the year of publication of this book) to 1969.

Please read: Wolukau-Wanambwa, E. (2018). Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African. In A. M. Kraehe, B. S. Carpenter, & R. A. Gaztambide-Fernández (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education (pp. 85–101). Palgrave Macmillan.

Please read: Wolukau-Wanambwa, E. (2018). Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African. In A. M. Kraehe, B. S. Carpenter, & R. A. Gaztambide-Fernández (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education (pp. 85–101). Palgrave Macmillan.

Please read: Wolukau-Wanambwa, E. (2018). Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African. In A. M. Kraehe, B. S. Carpenter, & R. A. Gaztambide-Fernández (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education (pp. 85–101). Palgrave Macmillan.