Developing Visual Arts Education in the United States
Developing Visual Arts Education in the United States

Author: Mary Ann Stankiewicz

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 113754449X

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This book examines how Massachusetts Normal Art School became the alma mater par excellence for generations of art educators, designers, and artists. The founding myth of American art education is the story of Walter Smith, the school’s first principal. This historical case study argues that Smith’s students formed the professional network to disperse art education across the United States, establishing college art departments and supervising school art for industrial cities. As administrative progressives they created institutions and set norms for the growing field of art education. Nineteenth-century artists argued that anyone could learn to draw; by the 1920s, every child was an artist whose creativity waited to be awakened. Arguments for systematic art instruction under careful direction gave way to charismatic artist-teachers who sought to release artistic spirits. The task for art education had been redefined in terms of living the good life within a consumer culture of work and leisure.

Brooklyn’s Renaissance
Brooklyn’s Renaissance

Author: Melissa Meriam Bullard

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-06-05

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 3319501763

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This book shows how modern Brooklyn’s proud urban identity as an arts-friendly community originated in the mid nineteenth century. Before and after the Civil War, Brooklyn’s elite, many engaged in Atlantic trade, established more than a dozen cultural societies, including the Philharmonic Society, Academy of Music, and Art Association. The associative ethos behind Brooklyn’s fine arts flowering built upon commercial networks that joined commerce, culture, and community. This innovative, carefully researched and documented history employs the concept of parallel Renaissances. It shows influences from Renaissance Italy and Liverpool, then connected to New York through regular packet service like the Black Ball Line that ferried people, ideas, and cargo across the Atlantic. Civil War disrupted Brooklyn’s Renaissance. The city directed energies towards war relief efforts and the women’s Sanitary Fair. The Gilded Age saw Brooklyn’s Renaissance energies diluted by financial and political corruption, planning the Brooklyn Bridge and consolidation with New York City in 1898.