Art Schooled: A Year among Prodigies, Rebels, and Visionaries at a World-Class Art College

16. Education of an Artist

[ 16 ] education of an artist he change on campus is imperceptible. From mid-April onward, at least for a week, something is different around mica. Calvin Blue, who is touching up white gallery walls for the Department of Exhibitions, picks up some clues. He notices that groups of adults are being escorted through the buildings. In the Art Education Department, classes are canceled for the week, so busy are the staff. Cory Ostermann, rushing to write her final Critical Inquiry paper (and to make a giant slice of bread for Sculptural Forms), notices the extra activity as well. At this time of year, of course, the change could simply be the weather. Classes are meeting outside on the patio. Fully clothed “life-drawing” models are in action on the lawn, students sketching. On the same lawn one evening, a mica fashion show unfolds. Each year, the Maryland Institute Queer Alliance holds its “Gaypril,” a month of activities about life and sex for glbt culture, at midpoint holding a “Day of Silence”—with chalk drawings on the sidewalk in front of the Main Building—and then in the evening “Break the Silence,” when a group of students bangs pots and pans in the spirit of coming out. The mysterious difference this week, however, is being generated off campus, down in the sports and tourism district of Baltimore near the Inner Harbor. There, the National Art Education Association (naea) has drawn 4,200 art educators for their convention. All week, teachers are shuttle-busing up to mica, the scene of ten workshops and events and where, up by the Gateway, a mural project is changing the face of a freeway embankment. “Practically everyone on the art education faculty is presenting” at the naea, says Karen Carroll, dean of the mica department (and recent naea “National Art Educator of Year”). mica faculty and alumni are playing roles in eighty of the academic sessions at the fiveday gathering. This week in particular, “art education” is taking on a double meaning . On one hand, students come to mica to learn art, taking one-third academic courses, and two-thirds studio courses. This kind of curriculum T [ 252 ] a r t a n d s o u l turns an art academy into a college. On the other hand, mica is also creating teachers of art. The job market willing, their certificates and degrees will obtain them work in public or private schools, kindergarten to twelfth grade (K–12). They also may become “community arts” organizers on the government payroll, or instruct in colleges (with the right certificate along with their master’s degree). In all cases, they become part of the art education system. It’s a power block in American education and a vehicle for a particular philosophical outlook on life. At mica this week, both kinds of education of the artist are taking place, revealing the school’s soul as the college that it is trying to be. [ ] For their part, freshmen such as Calvin, Cory, Jonathan Levy, Cameron Bailey, and Nora Truskey have no doubt that they’re in an art system. They’ve done art history. They’ve done lots of crits and gazed upon visiting artists, who have welcomed them into the fold. They are finding out what it means to learn art. For Jonathan, this ideally translates into teachers passing on their skills. “As much as I want to learn my own way, I want to be told of a technique that exists, and then go my own way after that,” The alluring Inner Harbor. Education of an Artist [ 253 ] he says. “Math students don’t have to figure out theorems, and how to do math, on their own.” That has been Cameron’s taste in learning as well, though he is hardly the ideal apprentice when teachers tell him what to do. At least he has found his two favorite niches, one being figurative painting in studio art, the other being art history in academics. Today in his After Modernism art history class, instructor Ellen Cutler is lecturing on the rise of modernism in America. They are following the classic textbook History of Modern Art, and the twentieth century is going by like a bullet train: Picasso, the De Stijl movement, the Bauhaus, then wartime art and regionalism in U.S. painting and photography, and abstract expressionism in New York City, moving rapidly to pop art...