Kingsborough history professor Megan Brandow-Faller’s recently released book, “Child Creativity in the Visual Arts from Secessionist Vienna to Postwar America” (Bloomsbury, 2025), traces the work of three Austrian artists and educators—Franz Cižek, Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska and Victor Lowenfeld. Their ideas about art and childhood, which began in early 1900s Vienna, helped shape what is taught in American classrooms and homes.

Cižek was one of the first art educators to encourage children to draw from their imaginations. Zweybrück added a strong focus on crafts and design, especially in media that has historically been associated with women; and Lowenfeld became a key figure in American art education, known for showing how art could support children’s emotional and social development. He believed that children’s creativity was more important than simply copying what they saw.

Brandow-Faller spent three years researching in archives in Vienna and New York. Her interest was first sparked by Zweybrück, a multi-talented artist, craftswoman and teacher she wrote about in her previous book, “The Female Secession” (Penn State University Press, 2020). “Like many of the figures in my books, she was forced to flee to America because of her Jewish background,” she said.

One of her most exciting discoveries was correspondence revealing Zweybrück’s collaboration with American designers Charles and Ray Eames. “I was stunned—in a positive way—by the rich intellectual connections between her and leading figures of mid-century American modernism,” she said.

Brandow-Faller’s analysis shows that the focus on children’s creativity and toy design in mid-century modernism was linked to larger design trends of the time, especially the use of folk and “primitive” art in modern interiors. This trend also brought up complex issues related to class, race and ethnicity.

After fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria, Lowenfeld went on to head the art department at the Hampton Institute, an HBCU in Virginia, where he supported African American students as they created and showed art at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA’s) Young People’s Gallery in 1943, an exhibition that was a first for the museum. “Jewish refugees compared their suffering to that of Black Americans and dedicated themselves to fighting segregation in the arts,” she said.

Drawing on research about DIY crafts and interviews with scholars and early childhood educators, the postscript explores how Lowenfeld’s criticisms of coloring books, cut-outs and children’s art competitions remain relevant in today’s digitally driven childhoods.

This is Brandow-Faller’s fourth book. Her other works include, “Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood” (Bloomsbury, 2018) and “Erasures and Eradications in Viennese Modernism” (Routledge, 2022), co-edited with Laura Morowitz.

Her next book, an intellectual biography of Lowenfeld, will center on his role in curating the groundbreaking MOMA exhibition. It will expand on the research she is currently conducting as part of a fellowship at the Center for Jewish Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is a 2025–26 member of the Working Group on Jewish Studies