Alice Mathilda Schwartz

Alice Mathilda Schwartz was born on 7 September 1918, in Salina, Kansas (USA), as the third child of four. The last name Schwartz as well as many first names in her family have German and Yiddish roots (Elizabeth, Ethel, Mathilda, and so on). This perhaps indicates that her family had German heritage.

Alice Schwartz went to Ward-Belmont Junior College in Nashville, Tennessee. After her school graduation in 1937, she continued her education by studying fine arts both as a bachelor and master in Kansas University, Lawrence, after which she taught design for two years at Kansas University. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg, today HFBK. According to her own recollections, this was in 1951, however, HFBK’s records list her as a student for the period 1953 to 1954.¹ . In 1980, she received another Fulbright Scholarship that took her to Seoul to be an educational media consultant for Korea. Moreover, she taught for a term in Panama.

Schwartz got her PhD in art education in 1960 from Penn State University and continued her path towards educational television. In 1965, she was appointed associate professor of art education at Penn State University and received full professorship in 1970. For twenty years, she also taught art classes at the Rockview penitentiary in Pleasant Gap, Pennsylvania, where she organized an annual art show with the inmates’ work. After her retirement in 1985, Alice Schwartz continued to teach at Lady Victory School at State College, Pennsylvania, as a volunteer.

Alice Schwartz’s time in Hamburg must have been a happy one, since she herself refers to it as “fourteen wonderful months spent at the Landeskunstschult [sic] in Hamburg, studying textiles under two exceptional German teachers.” From HFBK’s records we know these exceptional teachers to be Therese Hallinger and Hedwig Fischer from textile design. Schwartz’s holiday breaks were spent traveling around Western Europe, “sometimes riding two-on a motorcycle with classmates.”²

In 1992, at the age of 74, Schwartz married Edward L. Mattil, former director of the department of art education at Penn State and co-producer of many of her educational TV programs.

Alice Schwartz died on September 4th, 2002, in Village State College, Pennsylvania, at the age of 83. She had lived there since 1962. Alice Schwartz is buried in Salina, Kansas, USA.

Schwartz was a pioneer in art education television for children. She was both producer and host of the show Key to the Cupboard, together with Edward L. Mattil. This was a weekly program from Pennsylvania State University, broadcasted from Altoona, USA. The show had a mouse puppet that rhymed to convey information about an object or project at hand (bear in mind that the first episode ever of Sesame Street was aired in November 1969). At some point, Schwartz would step in to explain the project in more detail. Children would, for instance, learn how to make a peep box by filling a little box with ordinary things lying around the house like soda pop caps, straws, metal wire, paper sheets, and so on, but reassemble them so they could view them in a new light: bottle caps would become chairs, wires the cage for a little stuffed animal. The projects were meant to be easy to do, with materials that were easy to find so that viewers could be creative and have fun. To put it into Alice Schwartz’s words: “The secret lies in seeing ordinary things in a different way.”

It is also easy to find a few television episodes directed and produced by Alice Schwartz in the Internet Archive.³ They were created for teaching elementary school children and convey Schwartz’s styles and methods of both art education and TV directing; they are also great examples of a certain era in the USA and US-television. In the episode My Marks are Me (1976), viewers are told that children, when making art, shared their world through symbols, that their lines and dots formed coherent shapes which helped them make new discoveries. By listening and sharing information with their fellow students and the teacher, they learn better, is what the program states. It also features famous artists’ work and compares it to children’s art. The program’s underlying belief is that art education improves aesthetic awareness, communication skills as well as the capacity for visual judgment among children.

The episode How Can I Teach Art? I Don’t Know Anything About It (1976) is an instructional program for art educators, but also parents. Children’s contact with art is described as an awakening of all senses. It informs viewers about the importance of preserving and nurturing a child’s sense of wonder – the bigger a child’s imagination, the more its creativity can bloom. To this aim, the program suggests that classes at school should be open and inclusive so that everyone can participate. The teacher should be open-minded; students should be able to learn from each other, but also teachers from their students. The camera takes us into a class room where a teacher is encouraging her class to create worlds born from their own imagination, where, for instance, the laws of nature don’t apply. In art, the program suggests, anything is possible.

While watching these programs, I could not help but notice that there were also certain parallels between the TV teachers’ and our HFBK professors’ approach to their students: we learn from each other, from the teachers, other artists, and we need space and freedom. For example, in See What I Can Do (1976), eleven- to twelve-year-old children are exposed to the concept of sculpting, of subtracting or adding material (like clay). The children are asked to hold rocks to feel their texture. This is done so that they understand, in a tactile way, how the rocks, that come from a river, were smoothened by the water. This was the age, the narrator explains, when students developed rapidly and started to compare themselves with each other: the teacher should therefore be aware of their different pace of learning, their different fields of interest and personalities, all of which became apparent through their art.

In addition to these, Alice Mathilda Schwartz worked on a number of other art educational television projects at what we can today consider the heydays of educational children programming in the US. She was the project director for the 60-episode television series Meaning in Art (no dates available) for schools in Pennsylvania. Moreover, she was sponsored to direct numerous educational films for Project Spark by the Department of Pennsylvania Education. In 1975, she spent a sabbatical at the center for Experimental Television in San Francisco. She was the director of the national television series Images and Things, produced by the Association of Educational Television (the first episode was aired in 1971), as well as the author and producer of the TV series Art and you that came from the Southern Illinois University’s own TV station and was developed for nearby schools.