by Jack El-Hai

Many educators of the 1920s and ’30s used a tried and true method of teaching appreciation for art: exposing audiences to old paintings and sculptures that delivered a moral or religious message and fit within a time-honored definition of beauty. The teaching of art took a new turn in 1932, however, when the College of Education sent a team of innovators to the southeastern Minnesota town of Owatonna.

The National Farmers Bank, Owatonna, Minnesota. Built 1907–1908, designed by Louis Sullivan.

For years, Dean Melvin Haggerty had searched for ways to move art off its pedestal and into everyday existence. Such seemingly pedestrian tasks as selecting furniture for a home and guiding plant vines to decorate the exterior of a garage exercise life-enriching impulses “which are akin to those that prompt an artist to paint and draw,” he wrote.

In 1932 Henry Suzzalo of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching heard Haggerty voice his views in a talk to art educators and agreed to initially give the college $12,000 (an amount later increased) to finance a venture to bring art into the lives of ordinary people. Haggerty teamed with art instructor Edwin Ziegfeld to create an entirely new way of bringing art appreciation into a community.

Owatonna, a community of 7,500 people, became the site of this experiment because of its distance from any large metropolitan area, its economic diversity, mixture of European ethnicities, and its ordinariness. A team of four, including Ziegfeld, directed the effort. In the schools, the group developed units on designing family living spaces, designing clothing, beautifying the schoolroom, appreciating the autumn foliage, designing magazines, the role of textiles in everyday life, and the power of architecture in helping to shape a community. The teaching emphasized the decorative and graphic arts, and there was often not a beautiful painting or sculpture in sight.

“One other emphasis of the Owatonna Art Project was that it worked in the community as a whole, educating people in Owatonna in landscape architecture, home decorations, and other areas,” explains Margaret DiBlasio, art education associate professor emerita. “The project was built on the idea that in order for the arts to change a community, a sense of well-being had to be felt in the home as well as in schools.” New assessments were devised to measure changes in the artistic perceptions of the Owatonnans.

The project had the potential to become a national model for art education, but the outbreak of World War II brought it to an abrupt end. After the war, many educators placed a higher priority on developing individual creativity than on supporting a community’s aesthetic environment.