A Reflection On Forty Years of Teaching

Art History Class c. 1975

It was 1971. Richard Nixon was president.  Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell had been driving a golf cart around on the moon, and I had been driving a taxi around Philadelphia.  I was twenty five, and I had just been  offered a better job. I had met a man named  Phil Trachtman, 6 months earlier during my one man show of paintings at the Wallnuts Gallery, on Locust Street. Phil had just  opened a new graphic design school, named "The Art Institute of Philadelphia." He was  an art director in town and often had to hire fresh talent. But his complaint was that the graduates from the Philadelphia art schools "don't know how to DO anything!" He had to spend months training them at things  like "paste-up" and "mechanicals."  So Phil decided he would try a novel concept: to create an art school, where graduates were actually ready to work!

His faculty was created from working professionals that he personally knew. Sophia Chitjian, for example, was a fashion illustrator for Strawbridge and Clothier, and he talked her into teaching...of all things...fashion illustration! Well known graphic art/ illustration pros like Jack Duffy, Ralph Malatesta, Bob Arufo, Jack Martin and the amazing Charlie Ellis rounded out the faculty. Recognizing that foundation skills such as drawing and painting were essential, he also had a number of fine art types, like Harvey Silverman and Bob Koffler teaching those classes.  Art history was also part of the curriculum and when an opening came up, he contacted me.

Jack Duffy at the school...

I was invited in for an interview. I didn't have an art history degree. I didn't have ANY degree, only  a certificate, but it was from one of the great art schools of the world, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I had also had been making a bit of a splash with my work, had received several well known grants, including a Tiffany, and the Academy provided me with a letter attesting to my qualifications to teach. With that, the state of Pennsylvania certified me to teach art history- and Phil hired me for the highest salary I had ever received: seven dollars an hour! I had never made more the four, (including while working in a Pittsburgh steel mill) so this was a huge step!

I'm not writing a "history of the school" here. This is much more about what it has meant to me to be a teacher, and the value of a school such as AIP (as it was called then.) But, in January 1972, when I was hired, the school, amazingly,  had one person who did all the administrative duties, a woman named Alice Law. All the records were kept in paper files. Personal computers did not exist.  Our first graduating class, was two students. They both were hired, as were almost all of our early graduates, thanks to the "hands-on" curriculum, and the industry contacts of Phil and the faculty.  

So it was January 1972, when I walked into a class room as a teacher, for the first time. I greeted the fifteen or so young faces. I was their art history teacher. I was just slightly older than they were.  I began talking to the class about the Paleolithic period. I thought of the many exciting art history classes I had experienced.  To me it was akin to "time travel." I didn't have to fake any enthusiasm for the subject. Art was my life. I had a huge mass of slides which I had taken myself (thanks to my grants)  and used these to try to engender a love for the subject in my students. Several of those early students are still friends. I've seen them raise families, and one has a daughter who is an art history major in college.

Faculty from Cherry Street school

The school, in time, went through a metamorphosis. We grew in enrollment and after a few years moved to a much larger space at 18th and Cherry St. I began to teach drawing and painting as well as art history. Students from the mid-1970s era are now in their 50s, and many of them are Facebook friends, fellow art exhibitors, and teachers themselves.  We have occasional get-togethers, during "First Friday" events in Philadelphia's Old City section. I'm amazed at how MUCH they remember from my classes. I always tried to spice up art history with a bit of scandal or the bizarre, and those stories are remembered: was Vermeer a woman? for example.

My students and me in the late 1970s

In the late 1970s a major shift came to the school when it was purchased by Pittsburgh based,  Education Management Corporation. It was probably inevitable, because of huge changes in the graphic design and education  worlds. Computers were beginning to be used, both to run the business of the school, and in making art (the MACintosh!) Also, federally insured student loans were becoming more and more important, which meant accrediting bodies had more power.  It used to be a good portfolio was your ticket to a career, now a degree was becoming a pre-requisite.

So in 1980, now called AIPh (because AIP was the Pittsburgh school)- we moved to a massive new place in the heart of Philadelphia- 1622 Chestnut Street.  We had begun with Phil Trachtman's vision and less than 100 students on the second floor of an 8th Street retail space, and now we occupied an historic art deco structure in the exact heart of the city. We also had thousands of students. In evolutionary terms, this is called success, and there was a good reason for it. Our graduates were indeed building careers, and  their friends and children were coming to the school for the same "hands-on" education. Graduates were now art directors and were hiring talent from their alma matter. The school also went to great lengths to be anticipatory of the changing art world. When "Flash" became an important part of the design industry, for example, we had graduates trained and ready to go!

What I have always loved about our school, is that we will give almost ANYONE a chance. We have an "open enrollment" policy. You don't need a high GPA in high school, to be admitted.  Some people, especially pretentious academic "elites," see this as meaning we "let anyone in, just to take their money, or the government's money." These people, frankly have not seen a REALITY which I have experienced. Time and again, a young man or woman who had struggled to get D grades in high school, finds a path in life which is creative, fulfilling and viable at our school. Sometimes, the students we enroll are not ready, have not found their way, and it is the duty of faculty and administration to be realistic with those people, and fail them out of the program. I don't see it as a fault or an avaricious aspect of the school, that they were given a chance to succeed in the first place. Sometime, even our graduates cannot pay back their loans, (although most do.) But this is little different, percentage-wise, from what happens even at "prestige universities."

I have also had, in my forty years of teaching, many students who had degrees from other schools (including Ivy League)- which proved to be worthless as far as making a living in the world. They came to our school to do what they loved, which is art and design. Almost all of them get at least a viable start in the design world, thanks to our curriculum. I love it when I hear that 100% of our graduates have jobs in the field, and that happens quite often, especially in the web design department where I continue to teach.

 No one can tell me that The Art Institute of Philadelphia is anything other than, a force for good in our society.  There are certainly problems at our school, and as someone who has taught at 4 other major art colleges (PAFA, Rutgers, Rosemont and UArts)...they have the same or similar problems.  Teachers, staff and administrators sometime have different perspectives, but when it works as it should, they are all part of the same symbiotic system. The faculty is unionized at AIPh, and the union has been, from my view, a pragmatic force for betterment. It has been able to work with management in the past, to craft mutually beneficial contracts. In 2012, we are in a very difficult time. But we are all in this together. We have a shared endeavor: education.  If that is ever lost...a very fine thing will be lost.

What I see, and value, is this:  Every student I meet, is a son or daughter of someone. Many of them are parents, brothers and sisters. Some are former military with PTSD. Some are people, whose lives have become unviable, due to technological changes, and they are being re-trained for new careers. Some are young people, searching for something they have yet to define. Many have come from foreign countries, to study "in America" where they expect to get "the best education." Most of them are just out of high school. Some had the benefits of family support and great art programs. Some barely survived an environment of drug violence and indifferent teachers just struggling to maintain a semblance of order. Some...are brilliant- bursting with creativity and intelligence beyond what I recognize in myself.

 They all, have the full expectations of youth.  They  all, have some kind of HOPE. It has been my great joy to help them, along with so many dedicated faculty, and staff and administrators to achieve, their personal vision- their HOPE. That is the essential goodness of our school and why I  am  so grateful to have been a small part of it for the past forty years.

My former students and me- 2011

A Donation to Science

On the value of cadaver study by artists...Not a "pleasant" topic, but recounting one of the most affecting aspects of my journey as an artist. 

Why would a contemporary art student benefit from the anatomical study of cadavers?  In 2001 and 2002, as a faculty member at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, I lead a small group of students on  a number of study trips to the anatomy labs of Hahnemann University Hospital. It wasn't sensational in a CSI kind of way, and nothing very dramatic happened. But something "illuminating" happened, and I'll tell the story here.

Our art school had a reciprocal arrangement with the medical school. Their students could come to PAFA and draw from our live models, while our students could go, and draw from their cadavers. There was a kind of beautiful symmetry to that I felt.  To be credentialed for access to the lab, our students and participating faculty had to attend an "orientation" session, led by one of the doctors who taught anatomy at the hospital. We were told the protocols: no photography, no bare hands, no touching except to reposition. We were told to put the plastic sheets back when we were done, and if the subject seemed to be too dry, sprinkle it with water. We were shown how to dispose of our gloves and wash up effectively as we concluded our trip. We were cautioned about the sometimes shocking nature of what we would see. We were also told about respect... but I'll get to that, and to the profound value I found in the experience a bit later.

When I was a student at The  Academy in the late 1960s, the spirit of Thomas Eakins was implicit in the building itself. His anatomical casts, made from "flayed" figures which he had dissected himself, were displayed in the auditorium. In the magnificent  cast room, along with the life sized replica of Michelangelo's "David," was  Jean-Antoine  Houdon's life sized flayed figure. The work of DaVinci and others created a kind of mystique around drawings from medically dissected cadavers, but it was not part of the school's curriculum at the time. Why would contemporary artists need to draw from cadavers? What did that have to do with ART? Even the great tradition of the Academy had been affected by "modernism" it seemed.

But at one point, I had hit a roadblock in my studies, and my teacher Joseph Amarotico told me I needed to do more "serious study." I decided to do a series of drawings from the Eakins casts. I spent hours, by myself, sitting in the dimly lighted auditorium, drawing the casts, displayed in glass cases, and then translated those drawings into a number of paintings.  The first painting, was titled "Relic Man."  I had painted it exactly as it appeared- a torso only,  suspended from a hook in the display case. It was essentially a still life. I used a commercial flat black paint as a background which simulated the dark auditorium.

Even before I'd finished, I thought I had "found" something.  I was excited to show the new piece to my teachers, and their reaction was unanimous.  Ben Kamihira told me I had created "a kind of terror" with the piece and that I should stay right on this path. Jim Leuders told me "you are using the same kind of paint you've been using, but it just suddenly has meaning!" The fact that I can remember these comments almost verbatim indicates the importance of the moment to me! The "flayed figures" resembled the remnants of some horrible cataclysm, in a way.  The war in Viet Nam was in full rage at the time, and as I did large paintings of platforms piled with the dismembered casts of Eakins, the daily newspapers were filled with images of torn soldiers and civilians from Southeast Asia.

Those painting were my "breakthrough" to a personal style, and thirty years, and many style changes  later, I was invited to be part of the faculty at PAFA.

And so it was in September 2001 that the opportunity to lead the trips to Hahnemann arose. Two thousand and one. It was just a few weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center. The world seemed as dark again, as it had been, during Viet Nam as I lead a group of six students up Broad Street to the hospital. We had all been to the orientation, and I had reserved the lab for two hours.  We showed our identification to the security guard and wended through corridors to the room with a small sign which said: "Anatomy Lab."

There were about 20 stainless steel dissection tables spaced evenly about the large lab. Medical diagrams of internal organs, circulatory systems and brain regions hung like paintings on the walls. Strange equipment of almost medieval appearance, and green chalk boards with scrawled notes and diagrams lined the periphery.  Full skeletons were suspended at various locations. The ceiling was low with florescent lighting and some spot lights available on tripods.  One entire wall was taken up with large refrigerated stainless steel lockers which held the bodies which were not already "in process." The figures on the tables, were covered in white or black plastic sheets.  

To begin work, we all put on surgical gloves.  I removed a sheet from one subject and invited the students to do the same. In September, the subjects  were mostly intact, but the skin had been removed to reveal the musculature. This is the state at which Eakins had made his casts and was of clear value to the students to see how muscles connect and intertwine.  As the semester went on, the subjects were more and more revealed, opened and reduced to skeletal frames. The figures had a rubbery feel, and the odor of disinfectant and preservatives filled the air. The subjects were all sizes,  races and genders, but there were no young people. Some people had died of noticeable disease, some were crime victims.

We spread out, each student finding one figure which seemed to interest them. As I immersed myself into a drawing, I looked around and saw my cohorts, each  working with intense concentration, scattered about the lab, silently drawing these anonymous figures who once walked the streets of Philadelphia. There was essentially a "reverent" feeling in the room.

As I contemplated my subject, I could not help but wonder about the person. What was his life? How had it ended? Why was the body here in the lab? Was there any meaning to it all? I felt as if the "worth" of this experience for myself, my students, for Thomas Eakins and others back in time was more philosophic in nature, than artistic. It had more to do with the "why we make art" rather than the "how."

For me it was in the faces. I concentrated on "portraits." My students often did studies of muscles and limbs, and the instructive nature of seeing what lies beneath the skin, was of clear value to their ability to express form. We didn't talk very much about it at the time, and as the semester wore on, the number of students interested diminished, and I often went to the lab alone. In their defense, they had been working for 6 hours already that day, and doing two more hours was actually exhausting!

On one occasion, I went over and a doctor was teaching in the lab. I marveled as he had students find and name various internal organs or locations. The value of these labs to the medical profession is undeniable. The first time you go cutting into a human to find an appendix or gall bladder, it is much better if the body cannot be harmed!  I hoped, seeing these young people who intended to be physicians, that some of them were indeed coming to our life drawing classes, for the pure joy of  learning to draw a living being. I somehow felt it would make them better doctors, but don't know why.

Respect. When we teach life drawing, we always prepare the students to respect the models, who do a very difficult job for our benefit. There is a certain "clinical" objectivity which develops for the nude human form as you try mightily to express its subtle form in two dimensions on paper. But the respect for the cadavers was different. They could not be offended by crude jokes or sexual innuendo after all. But from my own experience and also seeing the medical students at work, I saw that the respect , was for life itself. Seeing the "machinery" of a human being as a mass of inanimate tissue, like seeing the gears of a watch,- precise, amazing, absolutely no wasted space, it inspires. When Shakespear's Hamlet says "What a piece of work is man..." it is testament to the miraculous power of nature. One can see this all as pure undirected, unmeaning evolution, or invoke a greater intelligence and meaning to explain the inexplicable. I'm a believer, and came to my belief through science, but I don't make a big point of it to others, and don't rule out that I could be wrong.

But I was surprised by what happens at the end of the semester. For over three months, the cadavers had been "deconstructed." By December, there were primarily skeletal remains left on the tables. It is at that point, that all of the remains are taken to a crematorium. They are reduced to ashes, and then a service is held. The doctors who ran the classes and medical students, who learned from these "teachers," gather at a local funeral home, and pay homage to those who donated their bodies to science. They can say a prayer or not, but the respect for the miracle of life, the inventiveness of nature to construct such wonders can only have been enhanced by their experiences.

One day as I left the hospital, sketchbook in hand, I was walking down 13th Street. It was crowded with hospital staff in scrubs of various colors.  A man with a bouquet of flowers in his hand approached a car, pleading to someone inside. He offered them through an open window, but the window went up and the car drove away. The man threw the flowers into the street. 

So the medical students prepare for exams, and the long difficult road to becoming a doctor. Art students sit with their blank canvases and ask, "what should I do?" Satellites orbit the earth. Data streams, web sites exhort, crowds laugh in theaters, individuals cry over  novels, a couple waits for a lab test, a man thinks he feels "lucky" in Las Vegas, and a teenage girl with a thousand Facebook friends, feels lost in a small town in New England...etc.

The Lump of Gold

The Lump of Gold

I'll get right into this. It involves a recent trip to the house in Carnegie, Pennsylvania where my grandfather and descendants  lived from about 1908, up until the 1950s. It also involves a personal "moral dilemma" as I considered  revealing some family lore, to the current residents of the house. Would I be doing a "good thing?" or would I set into motion events which would cause "bad things to happen?"  

Carnegie began as a steel town. It was named after Andrew  Carnegie, of course, the 19th century steel magnate, and was ringed with mills carrying evocative names such as Union Electric, Universal Cyclops and Superior Steel. My grandfather and several generations of relatives worked in those mills. My grandfather died before I was born, but my father related a number of stories to me about the man and this is one which he told me on a number of occasions. It seems, one of the jobs my grandfather did, involved working on a small furnace which smelted gold. With the right chemicals, a load of gold bearing ore would be heated, separated into impurities which would be removed, and pure gold, would flow out into ingot molds, producing slabs of the precious metal. At regular intervals, the furnace had to be "cleaned out." Small bits of pure gold collected in the seams of fire brick used to line the furnace and my grandfather had to take the bricks out, scrape off the gold bits into a collection vat, and put the bricks back into the furnace.

These little bits, he scraped off were "worth their weight in gold" literally- so there were strict security measures involved all through the process, and workers were routinely searched as they left the gold smelting area. But my grandfather had found, accidentally, that during the cleaning process, he collected very small flecks of gold in his pant cuffs! This revelation led to, what we might call, "deliberate accidents" where, at each cleaning, tiny bits of gold made their way into his cuffs. When he got home, these flecks were collected, and over the years, he began to accumulate a small "lump of gold."

When my father told me this story, he would always hold out both hands in a cupping gesture, when he described the appearance of the mass, indicating that it took both of his father's hands to hold the glittering ball. How much would a lump of gold, probably at least five pounds in weight be worth today? At current prices, it is about $128,000... So what happened to the lump of gold?

According to my father, guilt began to weigh on his father's conscience. The lump of gold was like a glowing reminder of human fallibility. He had stolen the gold, there was no getting around it. What could he do- sell it and start living lavishly? Everyone in the small town would know that he had done something wrong to acquire the wealth.  Should he return it to the mill and say "here, I stole this?"  There may not have been an easy option.

My father told me that the lump of gold eventually went "missing." The family story was that grand pa, had taken the lump and buried it in a deep hole in the back yard of the house, laying it to rest and ridding himself of what he considered a disgraceful moral lapse. But on the other hand, it was still where he could get to it if his family ever REALLY needed it...But no one really knew, and at the age of 56 my grandfather died without ever telling anyone what he did with the gold.

It was with this bit of family lore in my mind, that in June of 2011, I was visiting Carnegie for a few days. On Sunday, I decided to attend services at the church where I had been baptized over 60 years ago. It was the church my father and grandfather had attended.  It was the church where I was warned that breaking any of the Ten Commandments meant being plunged into a lake of fire in hell after death!  The God I was taught, didn't fool around!  You didn't "die" from the molten torment, you were already dead- so you just suffered! Now, as I sat in the church, a baby was baptized, children sang,  creeds were recited, and I knew every word,  and we all embraced each other in fellowship after the service.  I also thought of the story of the lump of gold.

I decided to walk up to the ancestral house, a few blocks away, and see what it looked like today. The house is on one of those incredibly steep yellow brick streets, where millworkers homes were stacked on small terraced lots carved into the coal laden hills which surround the town.  I found the street. (I won't use the name, because I don't want to set off a "gold rush" of blog reading "prospectors" with metal detectors prowling back yards in the middle of the night.) I wasn't quite sure of the house at first, because the wooden houses were now mostly covered in siding or asbestos shingles.

But my touchstone was a single house, which once belonged to my aunt "Emmy." I knew it was directly across the street from my grandfather's house. I recognized it because she was an avid gardener, and nurtured fruit trees as well. My aunt died many years ago, but her fruit trees are still there, and they were blooming that June morning! I then recognized what had to be my grandfather's house across the street.

I wondered...should I knock on the door, and tell the occupants the  story of the gold?

What harm could it do? I thought...so I climbed the steep concrete stairs to the porch. It was littered with car parts. Carburetors,  brake pads, hubcaps, bits of fenders and such were all over in a random manner. The salvaged car parts flowed into a small side yard as well. I guessed that a serious mechanic lived within. There were "Steelers" stickers and flags festooning the windows, and empty six packs of beer stacked against a railing. The house door was open, but a screen door was shut. I pressed a door bell button, but it had been painted over many times and didn't budge. So I knocked on the aluminum door making a rattling sound. I could hear a radio. No one answered. I tried again. No answer...

I thought, maybe they are in back, so I looked down the very narrow passage between the house and the neighbor's house. There was a gate, which I didn't want to cross, so I yelled "is anybody home?" There was no response. I tried the other side,  still no response. I decided to go for a little walk and try again a bit later. But as I walked, I thought again... "what harm could it do?" 

There was a car, idling in the street at the end of the block. A man stood beside it and was shouting up at a house- very angry, then got in the car, slammed the door and drove off, screeching away. "What harm could it do?"   I began to play the gold story forward in my mind. What I imagined, was me telling the story to a charming family. They rent a metal detector, discover  five pounds of gold in their back yard! Perhaps the husband uses the money to invest in "the car repair shop he'd always dreamed of owning!" Who knows?

But suppose they don't find anything. Suppose they are not charming, but bitter and rancorous? Suppose they become angry with me, with each other- the husband/ boyfriend etc. doesn't want to search, the woman does, they fight...who knows where THAT leads? They dig up their yard, rent back hoes, strike their water line or something and have thousands in expenses, all because I told them this story! Or suppose they find the gold and then the sudden wealth destroys their relationship.  My imagination was going wild as positive and negative scenarios played out. The angry shouting man had put a negative spin on my thinking, but I still had the positive scenario to consider. "What good could it do?"

I decided, maybe I was MEANT to be on their doorstep that June morning one way or the other! I decided I would give it one more try, and let "fate" decide  events. I went back and climbed the stairs. I could still hear the radio. I rapped on the door again. I heard movement, someone clearly moving around inside. But no one came to the door. I yelled in, and knocked again. More movement, but no one came to the door.

I knocked, but no one answered...I told myself, "this is what is SUPPOSED to happen." I turned and walked down the cracked and sagging concrete steps away from the house where my father had seen a lump of gold which took two hands to hold. I walked past the apple trees which my aunt had planted so long ago, and past the church where a baby had been baptized that fine June morning. I felt "okay" with what had happened. I wondered at how life is a series of forking roads, and how we travel along, going one way or the other, and how we do, or do not,  intersect with the lives of others.