Abstract
The story of the 1870 Massachusetts Drawing Act that led Walter Smith to leave England and take on triple tasks as supervisor of drawing in Boston’s public schools, state director of industrial drawing, and founding principal of Massachusetts Normal Art School is the founding myth of art education in the USA. This history of MNAS is a case study of efforts to embed art education into formal education for all learners. I argue that the development of American art education as a field of practice was a creative achievement made possible by dynamic interactions among institutions, notably MNAS, social networks of stakeholders, faculty, students, and alumni, along with cognitive frameworks shaped by social, economic, and cultural contexts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
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Stankiewicz, M.A. (2016). Introduction. In: Developing Visual Arts Education in the United States. The Arts in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54449-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54449-0_1
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54448-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54449-0
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