Child Art

This text is part of Munro's intervention at a Western Arts Association conference in the United States. He starts addressing the audience with a brief account of the steps made in recent years in American art education. The most important, Munro argues, was the recognition of the arts as a subject in the curriculum. Moreover, with this, a process of transformation of the teaching methods, from the "literal copying of the model, for the right of the artist and the art student to transform what he sees in accordance with some feeling or decorative idea of his own".

The text deals with the making of the developmental child through drawing. By the end of the 19th century, psychologists and educators started collecting children's drawings as 'data' that could provide knowledge on the child's mind development. These drawings created a way of reasoning about the productions of children as mirroring their mind, as well as expectations and images about the normal and the 'abnormal' childhood.

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The texts focuses on the colonialities of arts education practices such as developmentalist rationality, the historical equivalence of the child with the so-called 'primitive', the gardening practices and the straightening devices of education. It starts by analyzing the cover of the 1951 Unesco Courier and asks how this image seems so familiar to us?

The text is in Portuguese and can be downloaded here

The text looks at some metaphors used in arts education discourses, namely the metaphor of the child as a seed and as a plant, and of the educator as a gardener, whose function would be to conduct, without disturbing, the child's growth. These practices are contradictory and carry various types of violence, whether in the ways of imagining a universal child (having the subject European, adult, male, 'white', non-disabled, as a becoming) from developmentalist perspectives, or in the hope of their future.

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.

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.