Quite a lot of hugging and storytelling is going on outside the List Gallery. Name tags timeline more than 50 years, as is the case with all the alumni on campus for Alumni Weekend at Swarthmore. But all those gathered outside the List Gallery seem to know each other.
One
by one, they stroll inside the gallery. Suddenly, the storytelling
stops as if, in the face of art, communication changes. These alumni,
many with majors in studio art, walk slowly through the exhibit,
pausing in front of each work of art, taking the time to understand
the artist behind the art.
In the gallery this weekend are delicate Chinese ink brush drawings by Lloyd Craighill '49, bold and vivid oil paintings by Mark Van Buskirk '89, and detailed bronze-colored sculptures by Don Gordon '49. Craighill stands in a corner, quietly playing the violin he crafted and brought as part of his exhibit. Van Buskirk shakes hands with one of his classmates. Gordon sits on a bench while his wife, Joan, snaps a photo.
Gordon has never exhibited his work before. He's been sculpting his whole life, ever since he took a sculpture class when he was 8 years old. By 18, when he arrived at Swarthmore, he was hooked on the medium. But, 50 years ago, there was no such thing as a sculpture class at the College. No ceramics. No drawing. No painting. No studio art courses of any kind. A few extracurricular arts and crafts classes were offered, but Gordon didn't know about them, and the Art Department certainly didn't recognize them as part of its curriculum. "The aim of the department is to study the historical-cultural significance and aesthetic value of architecture, sculpture, painting, and graphic art," reads the 1949&endash;50 course catalog. "Since the objective ... is to foster an intelligent comprehension of the visual arts rather than to train professional artists, no courses in drawing, painting, and sculpture are offered for credit." So Gordon, now retired from a career as a builder in New York, did his sculpture during summer vacations and spent his school years studying political science.
Do studio arts belong at Swarthmore? The question is almost as old as the College and, during the past 130 years, has inspired much debate among the faculty and administration. The common notion is that Quakers considered the fine arts to be frivolous and nonutilitarian. Edward Hicks, a Virginia Quaker, had described them in 1851 as "trifling" and "insignificant" with no "substantial use to mankind." Yet the Hicksite Quakers who founded Swarthmore thought that drawing was useful enough to offer two courses--Mechanical Drawing and Freehand Drawing--to the College's very first class. In fact, in the minutes of the annual stockholders meeting in 1874, it was noted that freehand drawing was not only required for all students but "absolutely essential, and to all it must prove, if properly taught, only second in practical usefulness to the art of writing itself."
Rarely, if ever, has anyone in Swarthmore's history questioned the value of practicing art. The contention over the years has involved a far subtler concept--the academic rigor of practicing art. Does throwing a pot or painting a landscape or sketching a model involve the brain as much as it involves the eye and the hand? Do studio art classes engage the intellect in the same way that physics or mathematics or history classes do? Do the studio arts have a place in a liberal arts education--particularly in a liberal arts education with the intellectual standards that Swarthmore has achieved?
The answer was yes--until 1910. In the late 19th century, painting had been added to the freehand drawing course, a class that was pitched to students in its course description as "a very important adjunct to the other courses, especially to those in science." Courses in the history of art appeared later, in 1892, and when Joseph Swain became president of the College in 1902, two classes were offered in art history and two in studio art. Soon after, four more classes were added in art history. Then, in 1910, both disciplines disappeared abruptly from the course catalog. In 1912, art history classes returned, but studio art did not--and 56 years went by before it was offered for credit again in 1968.
It is not known why studio art was suddenly removed from the curriculum. Perhaps, in his push for higher intellectual standards, President Swain decided that the study of art should be only an academic subject. When Frank Aydelotte replaced Swain in 1921, practical art classes remained outside the curriculum. The art history program, on the other hand, continued to grow and was coupled with courses in music history under the Department of Fine Arts and Music--studies defined in the 1926 catalog as "critical and appreciative rather than practical."
When Aydelotte established the Honors Program in 1922, the concept of an academically rigorous education in the liberal arts jumped to the next level. Students, who may have been looking for an outlet from the increased intensity of their Oxford-style seminars, decided to start an extracurricular arts and crafts program. Studio art came back--conditionally. Listed as a "student activity" in the 1938&endash;39 catalog, the program description read: "Creativity at Swarthmore is undertaken for its own sake as part of undergraduate life. It is generally felt that some form of self-expression, in arts, crafts, or some other medium, is a necessary factor in the educational process.... It is hoped that all students will take part in some of these activities but will exercise such restraint not to interfere with academic work."
Although the College clearly viewed practicing art as a less serious endeavor than more established academic studies, including art history, the arts and crafts program turned out to be so popular that, in 1954, the College hired Barbara Elmore to direct the program. In a small office on the second floor of Trotter, which she shared with the director of dramatics, Elmore taught jewelry, enameling, and pottery. Painters and sculptors had their own room on the third floor. Ayala Talpai (Linda Becker) '62 took classes with Elmore who, Talpai remembers, was "covertly looked down upon by some students because she used her hands."
Still, Elmore fought hard for better equipment and better facilities for the arts and crafts program and won big in 1961, when the program moved to better quarters in Pearson Hall. "I felt strongly that studio arts should be on the curriculum," Elmore wrote in a letter to T. Kaori Kitao, former chair of the Art Department. "[I] could not see how art history majors could graduate without ever having tried their hands at painting or sculpture."
It's ironic that the Art Department--both art history and studio art--has made its home since the late 1970s in Beardsley, a building named after Swarthmore's first engineering professor. Yet art students have made the place their own. A ceramic relief in the stairwell leading to the department offices reads, in huge red script: "I thought I'd died and gone to SoHo."
But if anyone at Swarthmore can be credited with recognizing the academic value of studio art and then helping to change the College's perception of the discipline, it's Kaori Kitao, now the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art History. When Kitao arrived to teach Renaissance and Baroque art in 1966, she found a "rigorously verbal" curriculum--serious study meant discussion and interpretation, and serious scholarship meant academic papers. "Academics saw art as nonintellectual, as a pursuit that engaged the hands and eyes," she says. "Artists, of course, knew that it wasn't just hands and eyes but the coordination of the hands, the eyes, and the mind."
When Kitao came to the College, two cultural changes were working in favor of putting studio art back in the course catalog. First, abstract expressionism had started to be replaced by a new realist movement--Andy Warhol's pop art, George Segal's figurative sculpture installations, and Jasper Johns' flag paintings--that was concerned more with the tangible world than with the individual. This "nouveau realism," wrote art critic Pierre Restany in 1961, "registers the sociological reality without any controversial intention." As modern art became more tangible, the practical study of it seemed to become more acceptable as well.
The second change had a more direct effect on the study of art at Swarthmore. In 1955, the Quaker Fellowship of the Arts was founded in Britain in an effort to bridge the gap in Quaker philosophy that separated the aesthetic from the spiritual. Janet Stanley Mustin '45, who says that being both a Quaker and an artist has always been a challenge for her, works with the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts in Philadelphia, an organization modeled after the British group. "The notion that self-expression is a spiritual experience has been in revival," she says. "The traditional disapproval of the arts has vanished. Now art is considered to be close to the soul. And the soul has to have its expression."
Finally, in 1967, the College undertook a re-examination of its entire curriculum. Part of this thoroughgoing self-study, which was published as the Critique of the College in 1968, was a proposal by the Art Department to give credit for creative arts.
Soon after, studio courses received credit. Harriet Shorr '60 returned to Swarthmore in the fall of 1963--when no credit was given--to teach painting and drawing and administer the studio arts program, staying until the early 1970s. "Credit and credibility were important for the students," wrote Schorr in the third installment of a history of the art program recently compiled for the department's newsletter. Schorr also stated that "one explanation for Swarthmore's attitude toward the arts was the Quaker tradition: Quakers were suspicious of beauty that was not utilitarian."
In The Critique of the College, the Art Department also recommended faculty status for full-time art instructors. These changes and others were debated in faculty meetings. "Extreme opponents expressed their opinions," remembers Kitao. "Some of them had a very old-fashioned notion that what artists do is on a lower level of intellectuality. They compared it with athletics, claiming that art was a technical matter, like basketball." Nonetheless, painting and sculpture were approved for credit. The controversy dealt more with ceramics--one faculty critic compared the art to finger painting. The evening before the faculty voted on whether or not to give credit for ceramics courses, the Art Department had brought in a promising young ceramist named Paulus Berensohn to lecture. Berensohn explained that a ceramist makes pots in the way a tree makes leaves. At the faculty meeting the next day, Paul Mangelsdorf '49, now Morris L. Clothier Professor Emeritus of Physics, used the idea in his argument against the course. "Making pots," he reportedly said, "is compared with a purely vegetative function."
Mangelsdorf, a lifelong Quaker whose daughter graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, is somewhat less stringent in his opinion of art at Swarthmore today. "I think that the art program sets pretty high standards, and I've been impressed with some of the work the students do," he says. "But I'm still not convinced that work in the creative arts should be put in the same curricular category with work in the more academic specialties. Art ... contributes to the enrichment of the lives of the students. But it's definitely not in the same intellectual category with calculus or the study of the classics."
Professor of Studio Arts Randall Exon, the current chair of the Art Department, claims to have a limited, if not nonexistent, knowledge of calculus. "The problem is," he says, "there are also those who have a limited education in art but have very strong opinions about it. I don't know exactly what they are basing their opinions on. That said, I think we needed those opinions--we needed to understand what that generation of scholars and scientists meant by the phrase 'intellectual pursuit,' in order to push us to create a truly rigorous program.
"Making art is a complicated, critical--particularly self-critical--process that has the ultimate intent of trying to interpret the world in some way. That, to me, requires as much thought, criticism, and technical ability as learning how to write. There is also a deeper interpretive understanding required. Originality is as hard for a student to achieve in studio art as it is for a student to achieve in science."
Still, Mangelsdorf's feelings were not uncommon on campus in the late 1960s; as a result, studio art (eventually including ceramics) remained a program with no major until 1977, two years after Kaori Kitao became chair of the department. In that role, she was known for being outspoken on the subject of art at Swarthmore, including at the annual meeting when new faculty members were introduced. The introductions were made by departments in alphabetical order, so the art department went first. Kitao would say: "Since this is the only time art ever comes first at Swarthmore College, I'd like to take full advantage of the moment."
Kitao points to four crucial turning points in the more recent evolution of the studio art program. First, housing art history and studio art together in Beardsley Hall (an idea initiated in the 1980s by Harrison Wright, then provost) increased the dialogue between the two disciplines. Having them in separate buildings, she says, bred more animosity than collegiality. Second, giving studio artists the space they needed to do their work--big studios with high ceilings and lots of natural light on the third floor of Beardsley--encouraged the students' development and helped reinforce the fact that the College had come to truly respect their craft. Third, hiring four faculty members in art history and four in studio has brought balance to the department. Finally, changing the studio art major a few years ago to include 7 credits in studio art and 4 in art history (for years, the requirements were equal--5 credits in each) has enabled the department to offer a program that reflects the seriousness of studio art as an academic discipline.
"It has been, and still is, a constant upstream effort," says Kitao, who is planning to retire in 2001. Through the process of natural selection, as Kitao archly describes it, many faculty members who opposed giving studio art its own major are no longer at the College. Yet within the past 10 years, she has noticed a wave of conservatism among new faculty. "Some are alarmingly indifferent or unlearned in the matters of art. We have to be constantly alert to potential opposition."
But being unlearned in the matters of art is inherent in American culture, says Exon. "There's a problem with arts education in this country today," he says. "There are so many people with no education in art at all. Educational systems in other parts of the world see the study of art as fundamental, as evidence of a person's intelligence."
Mark Van Buskirk sneaks out of the List Gallery, where his paintings are on exhibit for Alumni Weekend, and sits for few moments on a brick wall. Van Buskirk has been exhibiting his art for 10 years, since he graduated as a studio arts major in 1989, and has been teaching painting and drawing in the bachelor of fine arts program at Mississippi State. In the fall, though, he'll move into a teaching position at Earlham College--a small, Quaker-founded liberal arts school in Indiana.
"I made a real conscious decision to move from a fine arts professional program to a program like the one at Swarthmore. I know that you can teach students technical skills, as a fine arts program does, but I also believe that they need the balance of liberal arts," Van Buskirk says. "I know a lot of great artists, and none of them is stupid. They need nourishment outside their field in order to make compelling statements in their work."
For a high school student who wants a college degree in art, there are essentially two choices: a professional program at an art school or university or an art major at a liberal arts college. Virginia Red, provost of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, calls it a yin-yang situation. "It depends on students and how they want to balance their time," she says. At the University of the Arts, students take one third of their credits in the liberal arts. The rest of their time is spent in studio classes. "They don't have to steal the time to do the studio work that they want to do. And so they graduate with an impressive portfolio and with enough practical experience to jump right into an entry-level position in their field."
When speaking with prospective Swarthmore students who have an interest in studio art, Department Chair Randall Exon is careful to distinguish between what a larger art school would offer and what Swarthmore offers--essentially the mirror image of the program at the University of the Arts. "I know many artists who are one-dimensional but not the artists who come through this program," he says. "I have students who can tell me the chemical makeup of a particular patina they're using on their sculpture. They don't just know the techniques--they know how their materials are made. They know the chemicals. They link what they're learning outside of the studio with what they're doing in the studio. That's what makes us different from a professional school."
It's not just the chemicals either. It's the ideas. Timi Sullivan '75, sitting on a wooden bench a few yards away from the crowd at the List Gallery, always knew that she wanted to paint, and so she came to Swarthmore--and majored in literature. "I wanted to learn about other things. This is a very intense academic place. And it exhausted that part of me. That's what I wanted--that verbal part of education. When I left here, I was ready. And that's when I went to art school," Sullivan explains. "Art isn't just about art."
Andrea Packard '85 also headed to art school after she graduated from Swarthmore. "When I was at art school, I found that having had the experience of so many art history courses and literature courses and political science and sociology gave me something to say in my art," says Packard, who now runs the List Gallery. "Some of the students I encountered had mastered their technique, but they didn't always know what to do with it."
There
are two other art exhibits going on at Swarthmore this Saturday. In
the lobby of McCabe Library, Bennett Lorber '64 is showing his spare,
intellectual abstractions drawn from the work of the Dutch artist,
Rogier Van Der Weyden. Lorber, a physician, has been painting since
he was a child. Lorber didn't take studio courses in college "because
there weren't any," but he says that even as a premed student, he
took as much art history as he did zoology. "Painting enriches my
life," he says. "It's not an extra part of my life--not like someone
playing golf on weekends--it's just something I do and need to do.
It's there all the time."
Down the hill, a hand-painted sign in front of Old Tarble reads "Student Exhibit," with an arrow pointing up the stairs. During the 1998&endash;99 school year, the main room of the former library and student center (which was partially destroyed by fire in 1983) was transformed into individual art studios, divided by shelves and rough partitions. Senior art students worked day and night on the pieces they planned to include in their final project--an exhibit that functions, for the most part, as their senior thesis.
Today, though, the partitions are gone, and the walls are festooned with art. One of the paintings is at least 12 feet tall and is covered with words: "I first met Gertrude Stein in Man Ray's apartment. Duchamp said, 'and how is Marcel?' Which was the big joke in Paris in those days. Je suis paraplui. But my days as a Dadaist are dead." Instead of printing handouts identifying which piece belongs to which artist, Jessica Smith '99, who organized the exhibit, simply wrote the list in white paint on the floor. It's been almost a week since she graduated.
"It was really hard to be in the studio art program here," she says. "There's not much of an art community. I've been trying to build one. But people here don't seem to take art seriously--including some art majors. I had to practically beg people to put their work in this show."
In the summer of 1998, Smith studied painting at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, an intensive program that gave students the space and the freedom to paint all day. There, she says, she got a taste of what an art school environment would have been like. By coming to Swarthmore, she chose yin. And at Chautauqua, she discovered that she probably should have chosen yang.
"I spent the whole summer with 30 people who were really focused and really into talking about art. Then, I came back here and tried to start the same kinds of conversations, and people said: 'I have biology to do,'" Smith explains. "I don't think that Swarthmore has figured out yet how to bridge academics and art."
Randy Exon thinks that Smith's point is valid. "Students leaving the College are a very critical bunch," he says. "They should be. That's exactly what Swarthmore taught them to do--exactly what a liberal arts education teaches them--to be critical about what they're experiencing, to reflect on that experience, but, most important, to try to make sense of it. Having been through Swarthmore, Jessica knows that she's going to go into grad school to a master of fine arts program and feel absolute joy with what she'll find there. I'm glad that she's thinking critically that way." Exon pauses, then adds, "But it will be interesting to talk about it with her again, in five years maybe, and see if she feels differently. I'm pretty sure she will."