Diana Schoenfeld first engaged in the arts as a child when she studied ballet. While in high school she attended the Actor’s and Writer’s Workshop in Atlanta, Georgia which was an important experience in her maturation as an artist where she learned the value of discipline combined with imagination. 

The current exhibition, Schoolhouse Odyssey, is a labor of love mixed with personal history.

A primary source of this ongoing project lies in my girlhood memories of an old landscape called the Deep South. I knew it before the bulldozers and tractor blades of development destroyed so much physical evidence of the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, the countryside of Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas was rich with picturesque old buildings representing layers of forgotten history.

Schoolhouse Odyssey is an exhibition of 90 gelatin silver photographs accompanied by 19th century schoolbooks and related ephemera, transcribed memoirs, and literature, both antique and contemporary.

In 1995 I began photographing small, remote location schools, curious to know if one-room schoolhouse experience still existed and how it compared to the past. Before long, I began to discover historic one-room schools predating those I visited.

Since then, this project has developed a life of its own with input from unexpected sources on schoolhouse history and related literature, the whereabouts of little known “ghost schools,” and memories of former teachers and students once associated with them.

Diana Schoenfeld visited Mineral, California, population 90, near Lassen Volcanic National Park, in the spring of 1995 and contacted Mineral School teacher, Jane Hoofard. The K-8 school enrollment was 24. This was the start of what was to become her Schoolhouse Odyssey photographic project.