Our Founders

Abigail Housen’s lifetime of research into visual learning—what she called Aesthetic Development—is the foundation of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). Beginning in the 1960s and ’70s, she wondered why so few people felt comfortable in museums and began examining how people respond to art. She and her research teams—including Karin De Santis—conducted tens of thousands of interviews across age and background, cataloguing kinds of thinking and empirically mapping how engagement with art deepens through time spent looking.

We assume we understand what we see — but visual literacy isn’t innate. Dr. Housen’s research showed that understanding what we see takes practice, and that traditional teaching rarely offers it. Her findings were groundbreaking: she identified many forms of engagement—questions, judgments, associations, laughter, uncertainty—as meaningful and often overlooked paths to learning. Housen earned her Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1983 with a dissertation validating her measure of Aesthetic Development and the developmental stages of visual learning. She later became Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Art Education at Massachusetts College of Art and consulted widely for museums and schools.

While evaluating education programs at the Museum of Modern Art, in the 1990s, she met Philip Yenawine, then head of education. After demonstrating that existing programs were ineffective, the two co-founded Visual Understanding in Education, the predecessor to VTS, and co-authored the VTS curriculum. Their goal was to bring more effective, evidence-based practice to teachers—especially those working with beginners and communities with limited access to art—and expand access to the deep learning art can spark.

Housen continued her pioneering research until the onset of Alzheimer’s late in life. She died in 2020. Her many studies—and her determination to follow the evidence rather than the experts—opened museum galleries, clinics, and classrooms around the world to the murmur of people talking, disagreeing, and building meaning together. We stand on her work, which not only deepened visual literacy, critical thinking, and collaboration, but also laid the groundwork for more engaging, inclusive, and effective educational practices across disciplines. In Memoriam: Abigail Housen

As co-founder of Watershed Collaborative, Philip Yenawine continues to develop new ways of supporting VTS adoption in schools and museums in the U.S. and abroad. Philip is the co-founder of Visual Understanding in Education (VUE) and the co-author of the VTS curriculum. He has been developing curricula and professional development that is used in hundreds of schools and institutions around the world since the early 1990s. Philip was the Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1983-93. He also worked in 1992-94 as consulting curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, and during the academic year 1993-94, as visiting professor of art education at Mass College of Art, both in Boston. He is on the Board of Art Matters, a foundation supporting contemporary artists. Yenawine is the author of How to Look at Modern Art, Key Art Terms for Beginners, and has written six children’s books about art. His most recent book, Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines, was published by Harvard Education Press in October 2013.

As Creative Director at Watershed Collaborative, Philip continues to work closely with teachers and inquiry-based learning. He remains an ambassador for VTS, speaking at museums and other forums around the world.