SeattlePrintmakersCenter

ps141006 Arts Leadership 

State of the art 

Aware of a trend in institutions which claim to prepare people for arts leadership, the author considers how to configure this trend into the context of his planned formation of an arts organization devoted to fine art printmaking, history and technology.  

Studio work

When I was in college (for 25 years, between 1960-85) there was a soft dividing line between studio arts and art history. By “soft” I mean that art history majors did not ordinarily take my classes in printmaking—but they could elect and few did take printmaking. Also, a few of the students got an undergraduate degree in printmaking and then went on to get advanced degrees in art history.

These memories of the blurry dividing line between studio and academics in art school came back to me this morning inspired by two incidents: One, a few days ago I met a woman with a bachelor’s degree in my field—printmaking—who is enrolled for an MFA in Arts Leadership, and, two, my need to install of an upgrade to my video editing software. With these are on my mind, I multitasked: While waiting for the install session to complete and wrote about Arts Leadership in the age of digital reproduction.

A new age is upon art students in the United States today. Whether art students are in studio classes, art history classes, arts management classes at the undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate levels. I consider myself in post-graduate studies; hence, my writing this essay, a requirement and if I upload to a blog, extra credit!

For me, the new age began around the 1980s when I was still part of the UW School Of Art. I left in 1985 as the sea change in art and education grew, and had begun for me in 1970. Like an earthquake somewhere in the ocean floor, thousands of miles distant, whose shock wave results in a tidal wave as the wave reached the shore. The quake in this analogy was technologies that erupted and became universal—ranging from mega early warning missile detection systems down to secret microphones in Richard Nixon’s office.

Technology has been changing everything ever since, constantly altering the course of human events and, also, Earth’s human life sustainability. From my position, where I am at the first stages of creating a new arts institution in Seattle called the Seattle Printmakers Center, I look with interest at the incident mentioned above of meeting a graduate student in arts management (she has a bachelor’s degree in printmaking, like mine 50-years removed).

Next I would like to contrast her curriculum and her cohort of classmates with the work I am doing, that is, forming the Seattle Printmakers Center; because I know the leadership of the Seattle Printmakers Center is very likely to be found among those students who are, today, in institutions learning the ins and outs of leading the Seattle Printmakers Center and its work.