The Decomposing and Recomposing of The Lowenfeld Memorial Collection

In this article, we investigate the decomposition of archives, materials, and memory in art education using the case study of The Lowenfeld Memorial Collection at The Pennsylvania State University. After Viktor Lowenfeld’s untimely death in 1960, colleagues, students, and friends donated artworks in his memory to what is called The Lowenfeld Memorial Collection. Donations were made throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but with limited funding and a lack of curatorial or archival attention, the collection began to deteriorate. Through this archival inquiry project, the collection slowly started to recompose.