Making and Being Made: Children’s Art, Anarchism, and Prefigurative Politics in the Modern School (1911-53)

Abstract

Popular conceptions of anarchists as bomb-throwing saboteurs overshadow the central role of educational reform projects and artistic engagement with radical politics within anarchism’s program for social transformation—especially during the height of its popularity in Western Europe and the United States at the turn of the last century. My dissertation spotlights the critical intersection of radical pedagogy and artistic practice at the heart of anarchist praxis by highlighting how adults and children alike expressed, and thereby reinforced, anarchist ideals in a range of pedagogical and artistic practices within the longest-running anarchist educational project in United States history: the Modern School of New York and Stelton, New Jersey (1911-53). Although scholars have contributed a robust social and political history of the Modern School—most notably Paul Avrich’s The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (1980)—my research emphasizes the key role of children, children’s art, and anarchist notions of childhood in modernist praxis, which remain unexplored aspects of Modern School scholarship. Ultimately, the interplay of anarchist politics and creative praxis at the Modern School was a ground-up phenomenon in which children were not just a subject for anarchist artists or a stylistic influence within an anarchist context—but makers of an anarchist art whose creative processes performed the labor of anarchist politics.