Critical Visual Art Education [CVAE] Club is a Chicago-based intergenerational group of visual art educators, scholars, practitioners, activists, visual artists, and writers. The goal of this collective is to re-imagine the field of art education, investigate shifts in contemporary visual art and culture, and to identify, expose, and promote more critical forms of visual art education. Our interests lie within critical pedagogy, social justice, social communities, contemporary art, and activism.

We have noticed that the field of art education operates from a seemingly marginalized and isolated position within the visual arts. This marginalization has caused the field to turn inward over the last 20 years often focusing on its own disciplinary concerns and teaching trends. CVAE Club finds this practice problematic. Not only does isolation place art educators outside of larger pedagogical conversations, but it also allows others in the visual arts and elsewhere to frame art education as  an uninformed crayon-toting 'art teacher' population rather than socially oriented critical practitioners that make a difference. 

Often associated with K-12 art teaching and the assumed rigidity of schooling, many do not realize the extremely vital role of art education within the art world, but things are changing. Thanks to museum studies and the many artists who participate in the genres of Social Practice and The Pedagogical Turn in Visual Art, we now see young artists and teaching artists reading books we've long held dear such as, Dewey's Art as Experience and/or Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As education becomes the battlefield in the fight to sustain Democracy in our culture, we are witness to the deconstruction of out-dated mythologies, i.e. artist as self-serving egomaniac and a move to artist as generous socially engaged citizen.