Meredith Pyle

ArtE 302- Delacruz

Talking Points #1

Child Art After Modernism: Visual Culture and New Narratives, Brent Wilson
• “I wish to examine the evolution of our grand narrative and to employ the very evidence that
the proponents of child art have used to make the case for it naturalness and its creativeness
to argue that child art is not natural, that is less, likely to be creative than are adults” (299).
• There was no such thing as child art--- child play, imitating adults
o “Adults paid attention to the artlike thing children produced only when they showed
evidence of precocity --- when the child, at a very early age, could imitate the art of
adults” (301).
 Yani (Chinese), age 4- exhibition at the Smithsonian in D.C.
• There was no such thing as child art--- child play, imitating adults
• “These prints reveal one thing: Becoming an artist meant acquiring skills and following
rules --- the rules established by adults…” (302).
• “They provide evidence for my claim that even when young people do no receive formal
instruction they borrow graphic schemata from the surrounding visual culture.”
• 1848- Rudolph Topffer first wrote about child art: child artist = apprentice
• Topffer influenced Champfleury which linked child art to modernism
• “But aren’t these characterizing traits of child art also qualities for which we praise the great
paintings in museums?” (307). –reveals profound insights, expressive directness,
communicate emotion to many viewers
• bottom of page 308 (11)- list of “conclusions” about child art (a-g)
• “I wish to argue that it is art educators, not children, who created what we call child art”
(309).
o A form or art that only exists in schools, around the world (Efland)
o School/child art is specifically guided by the teachers
• Encourage the breaking of artistic rules, conventions
o Promote imagination and inventiveness
• Picasso drawing two-eyed profiles- drew as a child or saw a book of children art
• Decline in quality of child art, mid 1900s
• “How would art education change if we no longer believed that every child is an artist?”
(320). List of questions we should ask ourselves about child art…
• “Adults have used child art for blatant propaganda purposes --- and they have gotten away
with it because children are assumed to be innocent and unbiased observers or victims of the
events that surround them” (321).
• “The media with which children are permitted to work in schools comprise cultural
influences that shape child art” (324).
• Should we let them “play” and explore or should we guide?

Teenagers and Their Bedrooms, Kit Gruaer

• Communion pictures next to ashtrays- past and present smashed into one space
• “The possessions one selects to endow with special meaning out of the total environment of
artifacts are both models of the self as well as templates for future development” (88).
• “On the one hand, it is individual adolescents who struggle with the dilemma of loving out
all the ‘possible selves’ they can imagine. And yet, it is society --- parents, friends, schools,
the media, and other social institutions --- that dictates how those possible selves should
look, talk, feel, and act” (89).