The Arts of Imagination Foundation is excited to announce a new collaboration with the Child Development Institute and 11:11 PROJECTS. This initiative will bring the participatory experience of fine art and interactive programming centered on the reflexive power of timeless stories to children and families in underserved communities of Los Angeles County. The Arts of…

In April 2023, Brady Schwind, Executive Director of The Arts of Imagination Foundation, traveled to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to lead a guest lecture exploring how we look at art and timeless stories through the lens of different cultural perspectives. To illustrate the conversation, Schwind brought with him designer Tom H. John’s original scenic renderings…

As part of its ongoing preservation efforts through The Lost Art of Oz, The Arts of Imagination Foundation is pleased to be assisting The International Wizard of Oz Club with the cataloging of the Club’s archives, which includes rare original artworks by W.W. Denslow, John R. Neill, Frank Kramer, and Dick Martin.  Archival cataloging begins with measuring, photographing, and…

The Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota boasts one of the finest and largest archives of materials related to children’s literature in the world.  The Lost Art of Oz founder, Brady Schwind has teamed with Bill Campbell of The Oz Enthusiast to revisit and photograph the Kerlan’s collection of artwork drawn by original Oz book…

“The Lost Art of Oz” founder, Brady Schwind was honored to be a keynote speaker at the International Wizard of Oz Club’s 2022 convention hosted in historic East Aurora, New York, home of the Roycrofters / Arts and Crafts movement.    ​​The Convention’s theme honored W.W. Denslow and the Royal Illustrators of Oz.  Brady spoke about his ongoing…

Recently, we chronicled the exciting rediscovery of an original full-page pen and ink illustration drawn by W.W. Denslow for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900.  This was the first major Oz find of its kind in decades, and it gave hope that even after over 120 years, works of this importance are still out there waiting to…

Life and work in Chicago during the early days of the 20th century meant a day to day adventure through a wild and wooly metropolis. Surrounded by the din and dust of industrial factories, streets crowded by thousands of workers, and a spider web of electrical wires that tended to inspire a weekly barrage of…

When it comes to ‘lost art,’ the hope is always the same. That somebody out there somewhere will come across something long forgotten in an attic that turns out to be missing gold. It can be a pipe dream wish, but sometimes –  just sometimes – as if from the Land of Oz itself, a…

As originally printed in 1904, two John R. Neill illustrations for The Marvelous Land of Oz On the quest to uncover the surviving original artwork drawn for the Oz book series, The Marvelous Land of Oz remains tantalizing.  Published four years after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this first Oz sequel was an enormous success in 1904.  Surviving photographs…

The following story was first published in the Spring 2020 edition of The Baum Bugle, the journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club. If you aren’t yet a member, what are you waiting for? When I launched the “Lost Art of Oz” project in the fall of 2018, my first goal was to make a list of all the…