This carefully researched book offers a dynamic and expansive Deweyan vision for the arts and education. This (re)vision acknowledges the influence on Dewey's aesthetics of art collector and educator Albert Barnes, while also exploring the various ways Dewey's writings on the arts, in moving beyond Barnes' "scientific aesthetic method," were an important resource for many innovative twentieth-century American artists, art movements, and arts-related educational institutions. Neither Barnes' influence on Dewey nor the features of Dewey's naturalistic aesthetics that made his Art as Experience a favorite text of many artists and arts practitioners have been fully and adequately acknowledged in existing literature on Dewey's thinking about the arts and education. This book effectively remedies that situation.
"Granger clarifies, advances, and augments a broad and open-ended 'Deweyan vision of the arts and education.' Enlivened on almost every page by concrete historical and contemporary examples drawn from the arts, Granger's highly readable book is essential for democratic educators, administrators, and policymakers who reject the zombie idea that 'real' academic work is inherently separate from aesthetic consummations."
-Steven Fesmire, Professor of Philosophy, Radford University; President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy; Author of John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics
"One of the most vexing characters on the American art scene was Albert Barnes: the self-styled, passionate collector whose good intentions to educate the masses ran amuck with a museum that, like his art theories, proved too rigid to be realistic. Thus, his friendship with John Dewey, whose wide application of art to life has been puzzling-until now. With Granger, we see that Barnes' lessons in how to look, while frozen in a formal analysis of modern French art, nonetheless unleashed
