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

Introduction: Portfolio Day

[ introduction ] portfolio day n a chilly December afternoon, an annual ritual shared by American art schools begins at the Maryland Institute College of Art, better known as mica. It is Portfolio Day. Students arrive with artwork—drawings, paintings, and photographs—to impress faculty at an art school where they seek admission. On this Sunday in Baltimore, the morning fog, gusts of wind, and wispy snow offer a gray contrast to the brightness of the “art kids.” Whether scruffy or groomed, all are armed to the teeth with proof of their skill and creativity. After morning campus tours of mica, the parents and students head inside for the main attraction : portfolio reviews. Portfolio “day” is not really a day, but a season, September to January , when art schools across the country transform themselves, each for a day, into shared recruiting stations. More than sixty other art schools have sent representatives to mica today to set up tables around the campus, as mica representatives will do at many of the other schools throughout the season. To get reviewed by mica, students form two long lines in the interior courtyard of the Main Building, a century-old edifice of Renaissance revivalism , a great marble landmark in this part of Baltimore, a neighborhood of brick row houses. Standing in the two lines, the students jostle folders and even big paintings. They inch across the inlaid floors, gazing up at classical statuary, replicas of works from Greece and Rome. They are standing in two lines because of the way art schools are organized . This is the distinction between “fine art” and “applied art,” the latter also called “design.” Those who file into the first room (fine arts) are interested in drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, or sculpture. Faculty members crowd around the tables and gently move the students along, giving fifteen minutes of friendly advice to each. They tell students how to organize an effective portfolio. They also take notes: They are looking for top students, the crème de la crème (French is a preferred language O [ 2 ] Introduction in the fine arts). The crème are likely to be recruited heavily, especially with merit scholarships. In another room off the Main Building’s courtyard, the wood-paneled President’s Board Room, students meet faculty in the graphic design, illustration , animation, and architectural arts departments—the realm of applied arts, not the world of “art for art’s sake,” but rather art for clients. Some say, “Art for money’s sake.” The students come at different levels of preparation, thanks to a feeder system for art colleges. The United States now has more than five hundred high schools for the arts (mostly magnet-type schools), an increase from twenty in the 1980s. In addition, most ordinary high schools offer ap (advanced placement) studio art.1 Their teachers have gone to art college. They help art kids develop portfolios, as one exaggerated saying goes, “before they reach puberty.” Whatever the preparation, mica has an eye for students with “a good fit” for the school. And so it is across Portfolio Day, a seasonal curtain-raising for each new year of art college. The nation’s art schools—about fifty that are independent and hundreds more that exist as departments at colleges—are The Main Building from the campus green. Introduction [ 3 ] friendly cooperators during Portfolio Day season. Their common cause: Fill the art schools, even as costs increase, high school graduation rates decline, and the racial and ethnic mix of the American student population is changing.2 After a season of Portfolio Day cooperation, the schools invariably begin a behind-the-scenes contest, especially among the top independent schools, such as mica. They compete over top students, negotiating benefits up to the eleventh hour. As private nonprofit colleges, the independent art schools also compete with the nation’s public colleges and universities, many of which have large art departments, but charge less for tuition.3 The Portfolio Day season ends seven months before students begin their life at an art school. Students’ Portfolio Day experiences are an omen. At every step of the way—to enter art school, graduate, win a competition, show at a gallery, get an art job—the portfolio, whatever diverse forms it can take, will be a key to their careers.4 If they become artists, they typically also must decide whether to do it for art’s sake...