Last Look

For many years now, studio art has been not only a nomadic department but also one that has been scattered to every point of the compass. Our two drawing studios, housing the discipline that is at the core of our program, are in Brooks Hall, over there toward the east. We teach six sections of drawing a semester and, had we the resources, could teach that many more. Our beginning drawing students immediately encounter senior professors in those studios, nationally recognized painters and printmakers who work one-on-one with them.

Brooks also houses our film concentration, taught by a professor who has won such prestigious awards as the Guggenheim and the Prix de Rome. Over beyond Fayerweather, to the north, is our administrative office, which houses many of our department records and some of our professors’ offices. Toward the west are our temporary quarters, the two Dell buildings, housing printmaking, painting, sculpture and photography with professors who have exhibited nationally and internationally and have won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Guggenheim. To the south lies Wilson Hall, which houses our young digital arts concentration.

We have all four corners of the Universe, or at least the University, covered. None of these places would we as a collective department call “home.” We have been nomadic, even somewhat homeless. Jacob Bronowski stated in his popular book and TV series, “The Ascent of Man,” that before civilization could be built, man had to be settled and stable. So it is with any creative cultural endeavor like art making. In order to create, the artist first needs a sacred space, an incubator of birthing energy, a laboratory, that special place Virginia Woolf calls “a room of one’s own.”

That is why the pursuit of something as lofty as the making of art is so intrinsically tied to the brick and mortar of real estate. Given the intensity of artists’ love for their work and the extent of labor involved in creating it, it would be easy to make an argument that most artists spend more time in their studios than they do in their own homes. It is, to many of us, our spiritual home. (When I say “spiritual home,” I don’t mean a church. I mean a place where one can work the soul inside/out.) It certainly is a special place for the art students who develop a unique relationship to the building they work in for four or more years.

Our art students will spend an extraordinary amount of time in their studio art building, unlike other buildings across Grounds, before they graduate. For a start, given the labor intensity of a typical studio class, courses here and across the country are two real hours for every credit hour, as opposed to a normal lecture’s course of one real hour to one credit hour per week. In addition, each studio class demands approximately an additional eight hours or more of outside class work a week to finish assignments.

Soon, in the near future, most of this extra work will be done in Ruffin Hall. And like all artists and their studios, it will be an art student’s second home, and hopefully to most of them, their spiritual home.