I Couldn't Include Everyone In My Piece My Piece "Form, Function And Fun: Playgrounds As Art Education,"

Hans Kappler. Gift 13: Paper Cutting (Kindergarten material based on the educational theories of Friedrich Froebel). c.1920 | MoMA

Art + Math

Sol Lewitt, Geometric Shapes Within Geometric Shapes 1979 

Holy Night Ruthie Aybar 3rd Grade USA

Source: The Henry Schaefer-Simmern Collection, Children's Museum of Art, New York (CMA1264.20)

Isamu Noguchi's rendering for a playground. I wrote about the educational philosophy behind these artful playgrounds in a post called "Fröbel’s Gifts, Noguchi’s Playgrounds" on Artfully Learning. Read it here: https://theartsandeducation.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/frobels-gifts-noguchis-playgrounds/

Louise Berliawsky, (no title), c. 1905. Courtesy of the American Art Collaborative.

This is an early twentieth century interior scene by a young girl named Louise Berliawsky, who grew up to become renowned for her modernist monochromatic, wooden sculptures under the name Louise Nevelson. Read more about the importance and influence of children's art in modern and contemporary culture via my Artfully Learning post "Conference of the Animals & 120 Years of Children Drawing New York City."

Left: Jayson Musson as “Jay” with “Ollie.” Jayson Musson, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, His History of Art, 2022. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño. Right: Joseph Beuys during his performance of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Schelma Gallery, Dusseldorf, 26 November 1965. Photo credit: Walter Vogel.

I went to Philly to see His History of Art by Jayson Musson at the Fabric Workshop and Museum and wrote about its pedagogical use of satire to challenge art educational conventions on my blog Artfully Learning. Read about it in the post "Whose History of Art?"

Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, David Novros, ForrestMyers, Robert Rauschenberg and John Chamberlain, Moon Museum, 1969, lithograph of tantalum nitride film on ceramic wafer. Source: MoMA

Whether or not you believed they put an art museum on the moon, my latest Artfully Learning post highlights art's universal value. Read about how the Space Race impacted art education and led to STEAM learning in "Art Spaces: Interdisciplinary and Interplanetary Explorations Through Artful Learning"

A highly inventive childhood drawing by renowned American abstract painter Louise Fishman.

Louise Fishman, FOOD COUPONS FOR IMAGINARY BROTHERS & SISTERS, 1947 

Note, she’d have been around 8 at the time.

Ruth Asawa | Jillian Tamaki

Detail of Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex, 1995, acrylic, latex, foam core, fiberglass, wood. Source: https://mikekelleyfoundation.org/artwork/educational-complex

This might sound shocking coming from an education blogger, but I have been wondering whether compulsory education and traditional schools are leading us astray and even worse, harming our students’ well-being. My post, "Educational Complex" explores topics of unschooling and Youth Rights and uses artist Mike Kelley's Educational Complex as an example of some problems within compulsory education. Read it on Artfully Learning: https://theartsandeducation.wordpress.com/2022/08/01/educational-complex/