Frances Benjamin Johnston — 6 Girls in Art Class, Drawing at Easels, Eastern High School, Washington D.C 1899

Dr. Bert Stabler will speak at our first colloquium meeting for this year at 11 a.m. on Monday, October 7 in Wey 208. All are welcome.

A Sentimental Art Education

The roots of art education in the U.S. are connected to notions of pedagogical empathy and cultural uplift that were bound up with racial politics and aesthetics in the Civil War era. Considering a range of artists, educators, and philosophers, I will sketch out a basic approach for linking the idealized attitude of the art classroom, its personalized attention to expression and individuality, with the ways in which nonwhite groups have and have not been integrated into the American citizenry.