Abstract
This second themed edition of Global Studies of Childhood, “Children’s Art in Times of Crisis”, continues the conversation about how children’s art, and art about childhood, can contribute to issues related to ethics, justice, and social conflict. As was the case in the first issue, the authors gathered here offer an interdisciplinary and transnational exploration of the affective, aesthetic, and socio-political processes involved in making art that centers childhood. They call on us as readers to witness children’s creativity and offer careful and critical engagements with children’s aesthetic expressions of both suffering and optimism. Here, art includes drawings, paintings, sculpture, radio broadcasting, and film. Each contributor offers a new angle on the question of what children’s art can do to repair a broken world. The answer is not intelligible through one disciplinary perspective or methodological approach to knowing. From within the fields of child studies, diaspora studies, sound studies, history, anthropology, and literary studies, the authors provide commentary on the power of art to gesture toward gaps between children’s experiences and assertions about their required protection. This interdisciplinary collection of perspectives aims not to save children on the basis of their perceived innocence, but to learn from their complex reactions to injustice.
Yolanda Leyva’s article, “‘Behind each beautiful painting is a child longing to be free’: Deep visual listening and children’s art during times of crisis” explores a surviving collection of 29 of 400 pieces of art created at the Tornillo “Temporary Influx Center” in Texas by children and youth immigrant detainees separated from their families. Leyva co-curated these works for a 2018 exhibit at the Centennial Museum shortly before the detention center closed. In the absence of any contact with or information about the young artists as individuals, Leyva asks the question, “how can we learn about the children who created the art when we are unable to speak with them?”. She then proposes a process of “deep visual listening” informed by Tina Campt’s practice of “listening to images. . . a practice of looking beyond what we can see and attuning our senses to the other affective frequencies” the visual can convey (Campt, 2017).
In “Miraculous, mutilated, mundane: Redrawing children’s art in Francoist Spain,” historian Anna Kathryn Kendrick examines how children’s drawings were “celebrated, co-opted, and made central to the reformulation of creative education during the Spanish postwar and Francoist regime.” Focusing on three influential figures’ engagements with children’s art– artist Ángel Ferrant, critic Sebastià Gasch, and the teacher and novelist Josefina Aldecoa– Kendrick explores the generative capacity of children’s art as a form of expression, postmemory, resistance, reinvention, and recovery, while resisting simple interpretation of the works themselves or their historical instrumentalizations. In so doing, she offers a careful reading of children’s art that opens toward greater nuance and connection across time and space.
In “‘The desert’s no home for a rose’: Filipinx childhood and music as aesthetic experience” Casey Mecija extends the discussion of young people’s aesthetic expressions into the territory of sound and music. Uniquely, she blends sound studies, queer theory, child studies, and Filipinx diaspora studies. Engaging with the film Yellow Rose by Diane Paragas (2019), she proposes a notion of “queer sound” that can operate as a “framework for understanding the abjected traces of racism, forced separation, and empire that structure some children’s lives.” Mecija studies Yellow Rose for its capacity to “offer important insights into the reparative utility of music for a child separated from a parent due to deportation.” For Mecija, music is a form of art that sonically opens us toward consideration of how a child’s creativity engenders hope in a time of crisis. “Through her writing, singing, and performing of country music,” Mecija explains, “the film’s young protagonist “repairs the psychic pressures of having to be legible to the state, to her mother, and to herself.”
Wright and Morales provide a different account of the participatory impulses that drive young people to create art. In “‘Where your voice burns like fire’: Visual art and radio broadcasting as modes of intergenerational political socialization among the Purépecha of Cherán, México,” they offer a discussion of radio broadcasting and visual art as semiotic repetoires. In doing so, they ask readers to consider children and youth’s participation in Indigenous social movements in Mexico, insisting that “theoretical articulations” of childhood “not be reduced to their most logocentric varieties.” Child and youth activists among the Purépechan people of Cherán, Michoacán, México, they argue, offer a challenge to “normative, adult-directed models of political socialization and participation.”
In her article, “German Children’s Art During World War One,” Carolyn Kay examines a set of drawings produced in 1915 by students at a primary school in Wilhelmsburg. Arguing that in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, “the family and the child became a central object of nation-building and of nationalism,” Kay contextualizes the children’s artistic production within the nationalistic propaganda that surrounded them, and points to intertextual resonances and influences to gain insight into the meanings and possible motives behind these works. Deepening this contextualization, she considers how shifts in education more broadly, and art education specifically, intersected with intensifying nationalism, emerging ideas about child development in psychology, and increasing precarity through the war years in ways that would have been felt by the child artists. While noting the epistemological challenges of interpreting children’s art outside of its historical context and without the assistance of the artists, Kay’s careful visual and historical analysis of the children’s artwork offers insights into the iconography of individual children and the broader socio-political contexts they inhabited.
In the face of multiple and intersecting global crises driven by continuing racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, colonialism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change, the papers assembled here show us the contributions that children’s art can make to our understanding of crises. As children are some of the most prolific producers of art, there is no shortage of cultural production that adults might engage with to better understand and learn from their perspectives. While such engagement is neither simple nor straightforward, such efforts can work against the pathologizing frames of development and Eurocentric definitions of trauma, and undo overly simplified binaries of passivity and agency, and victimhood and resilience, which have historically defined children in delimiting ways. The authors assembled within this themed edition on “Children’s Art in Times of Crisis” not only urge readers to engage in this work, but provide constructive approaches to do so, while recognizing the inherent incompleteness therein. We hope that their contributions will stimulate broader and deeper reflections on how to better engage with children’s art as a way of learning more about their perspectives and the societies they inhabit.
The work done here is with sincere thanks to Brooklyn Ciccotelli, who provided research assistance for both issues. Nicola Yelland offered much appreciated editorial guidance, and thanks are given to the reviewers who were able to offer sharp and generous feedback to authors. This is certainly a collective effort and one that owes a great deal to the children and childhoods that challenge the presence of injustice.