Inventing Kindergarten October 14, 2006 — January 7, 2007 Kindergarten was created by Friedrich Froebel in the 1830s and grew to become what is now one of the most familiar shared milestones throughout the world. Froebel's kindergarten involved play with so-called "gifts," a series of educational toys, including building blocks, parquetry tiles, origami papers, modeling clay, sewing kits and other design projects, intended to foster curiosity and teach young children about art, design, mathematics and the natural world. The exhibition has been co-curated by Institute For Figuring director Margaret Wertheim along with collector and Froebel scholar Norman Brosterman in association with Williamson Gallery director Stephen Nowlin. Link to the Institute For Figuring / Inventing Kindergarten website. Wertheim notes in her exhibition essay, "Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of vaguely educative, playful activities that serve as a kind of preparatory ground for school proper, but in its original incarnation kindergarten was a highly formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. Properly conducted, Froebel believed that education for the very young would enable the flowering of human potential, for kindergarten was literally the garden of children where young buds might unfurl and bloom. 'By education,' he declared, 'the divine essence of man should be unfolded, brought out, lifted into consciousness.' For Froebel, education of the very young was nothing less than a holy duty, 'a necessary, universal requirement' that was beginning to assert itself as the birthright of all humanity." Brosterman's collection includes almost 30,000 objects and artifacts, preserved in large part by the efforts of women teachers who embraced and disseminated the Froebel method throughout nineteenth-century Europe and into the United States. Included among the young children these women taught were Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. Many of the other form-givers of the modern era - including Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky - were directly influenced by Froebel methods and tools. In his book, Brosterman traces the influence Froebel's kindergarten method exerted on the subsequent development of Modernism. While installed in the college's gallery, the subject of Inventing Kindergarten is being reflected and expanded throughout Art Center's learning environment, from classroom projects and studios exploring the design of twentieth-first century toys and pedagogical objects, to seminars for educators using art and design to enhance the teaching of academic subjects. The exhibition is part of a broad college initiative called "Thinking-Making-Learning," which includes two other simultaneous exhibitions at Art Center's South Campus: Paths to Empowerment, an exhibition of K-12 design-based learning methods, and Envisioning 6-Year-Old Boys, a design research case study (thinkingmakinglearning.net). The Institute for Figuring is a Los Angeles based nonprofit organization devoted to enhancing the public understanding of the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. Its founder/director Margaret Wertheim is a science writer and author. Norman Brosterman, an architect by training, lives in New York and is a curator, collector, and author of Inventing Kindergarten (Abrams, Inc.). The Williamson Gallery presents curriculum-based exhibitions of art and design, student projects, and installations at the intersection of art and science. Its founding director is Stephen Nowlin. Inventing Kindergarten is made possible in part by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Annenberg Foundation, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and the Pasadena Art Alliance.