Rhoda Kellogg

Rhoda Kellogg (b. 1898, Bruce, WI, d. 1987, San Francisco, CA) was an Early Childhood scholar, educator, theorist, author, and activist. She amassed an extensive and wide-ranging collection of child art through her travels around the world and through her work with children in numerous preschool programs, including Phoebe A. Hearst Preschool, which she designed and built. Over the course of six decades, Kellogg earned an international reputation for her pioneering research in early graphic expression through teaching, lecturing, and publishing, notably in her books What Children Scribble and Why (1955), The Psychology of Children’s Art (1967), Analyzing Children’s Art (1969), and Children’s Drawings, Children’s Minds (1979). In these works, she explains and documents her theories that children in all cultures follow the same graphic evolution in their drawing, from scribbles through certain basic forms, and that children’s art can be a key to understanding the mental growth and educational needs of children, as well as the production of art more generally.