One Hundred Years of Revolutionary Experiments in Art Education

Abstract

“One Hundred Years of Revolutionary Experiments in Visual Art Education” defines and clarifies four often-invoked yet elusive concepts in visual art and visual art pedagogy: “experimental,” “progressive,” “critical,” and “radical.” Using the Marxist-theory based Whitney Independent Study Program in New York as a case study, an institution now transitioning from over a half-century under the continuous leadership of director Ron Clark, it helps write the history of the past one hundred years of revolutionary art training. In particular, this essay argues that the critical theory in contemporary art education taught at organizations like the Whitney Program, though built on a foundation initiated by experimental art schools such as the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Vkhutemas, has dramatically reinvented the terms in which progressive politics are understood in visual art. To truly understand the Whitney Program’s unique form of revolutionary experimentation requires contending with the radical element of its pedagogy as laid out in the definition this essay provides of radical pedagogy, that is, the ISP’s emphasis on social change. This emphasis comes to the ISP in large part from the Frankfurt School, which, beginning in the 1920s, embarked on a critique of the culture and social forms of modernity, exploring the anomie and alienation at the heart of capitalist class inequality. The ISP is radical in the literal meaning stemming from the Latin radix (root), as it questions the basis of art at an ideological level: what roles it serves, and how it can align with other forces in society advocating for social justice, racial, gender and class equality, and economic redistribution.