Through
much of its history, the study of child and adolescent art has been
shared by three professional groups: psychologists, art educators,
and artists--groups that have always tended to occupy distinct and
somewhat isolated positions. Each group regarded child art through
lenses sharply focused on a particular aspect of the phenomenon. Researchers
in these fields have operated independently of one another, inspired
by their own motives, largely unaware that other parties viewed the
same phenomenon differently and for different reasons. The modernist
"grand narrative" of child art was an unstable amalgam of these disparate
views, a bundle of contradictions that portrayed child art as both
a natural endowment and as a fragile gift, a capacity to be preserved
and honored and guarded against intrusion, yet one that is (almost
paradoxically) the subject of education.
 One
principle has emerged as irrefutable in the past century of interest
in child art: The perspectives on child art available to any adult
will vary according to the position that adult occupies in the world.
For those who study child and adolescent art and visual culture, this
range of perspectives is both a blessing and a curse; while it sustains
the constant possibility of seeing children's images freshly, it also
means that groups of scholars operate without knowledge of the work
that others have done, and the perspectives offered are as often partial
and distorted as they are unexpected and illuminating.
The purpose of this symposium is to bring together scholars from diverse
fields who are engaged with issues related to child and adolescent
art and visual culture, in order to solidify and enhance interest
in this emergent interdisciplinary field of inquiry. We begin with
a number of basic questions: How can we supplant, or supplement, the
modernist vision of child and adolescent art, with all of its contradictions?
How can we develop informed perspectives on the ways in which children
and adolescents participate in the production and reception of art
and visual culture in the twenty-first century? How might the lives
of children and adolescents be improved if adults acknowledged their
capacity to produce meaningful visual forms and to find meaning in
the images and objects that surround them? Can we develop these understandings,
within and across disciplines, without succumbing to the temptation
to generalize irresponsibly, to seek universal traits and trends,
to ignore or minimize local variation? Can we create, and accept as
valid, a series of small "counternarratives" in place of the grand
metanarrative of child art that has for so long conditioned our response
to the images children produce? To paraphrase a question posed by
Elliot Eisner many years ago, what do we know about the visual culture
of childhood and adolescence, and what do we need to know?
Faculty organizers: Christine Marmé
Thompson and Brent Wilson, Art Education Program, School of Visual
Arts, College of Arts and Architecture, Penn State
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