In 1879, Washington University launched the first professional, university-affiliated art school in the United States.
Two years later it added the first art museum west of the Mississippi River, and in 1902, established what would become one of eight founding members of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
This fall marks the start of a new chapter. Classes are now under way in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, which gathers those three distinguished entities into a single academic and administrative unit.
Dedicated to the creation, study and exhibition of multidisciplinary and collaborative work, the Sam Fox School reflects larger developments within art and architecture education, explained Dean Carmon Colangelo, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration in the Arts.
“We sometimes talk about ‘thinking outside the box,'” said Colangelo, an acclaimed printmaker who arrived on campus in July. “But students today don’t even recognize that there is a box. Emerging technologies and new forms of artistic production have profoundly affected the way we view and interact with the world. There’s a sense of openness, a freedom and an ability to move between categories and disciplines.
“On the one hand, students still need to master the craft of their respective, medium-specific disciplines,” Colangelo continued. “On the other hand, they also benefit from exposure to interdisciplinary training and dialogue. Our challenge is to provide an educational structure that fosters, rather than impedes, such collaborations.”
Colangelo noted that several points of convergence have begun to emerge within the school, encompassing new facilities and curricula as well as exhibition programs.
The Whitaker Foundation Learning Lab — a 3,000-square-foot media center located in the new Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum — contains laser plotters, printers and other specialized equipment for architecture, art and design majors. Facilities also include 25 workstations, research studios to accommodate sound and video production and technical and faculty offices, the latter allotted by application and designed to support digital-intensive projects.
“Fifteen years ago media centers were conceived as static, classroom-style environments,” said Peter MacKeith, associate dean of the Sam Fox School and associate professor of architecture, who oversees the Whitaker lab. “Today things are very different. Most students arrive on campus with laptop computers. Thanks to wireless technology, instruction in many softwares is actually better accomplished in the individual studio.
“The media center is now more akin to a research lab,” MacKeith continued. “We have dramatically expanded server capacity and shifted away from stand-alone dual-processing machines in favor of what is called a ‘render farm,'” which distributes large, labor-intensive projects amongst a powerful computer cluster. “Students can develop basic frameworks in the studio then upload them to the render farm for heavy number crunching.”
A critical perspective
In September, the Whitaker lab launched a series of one-credit, weekend-long workshops on new media. The first of these, which included both art and architecture students, was led by Marcos Novak, an influential theorist and designer. Subsequent workshops will feature Christiane Paul, curator for new media at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and Winy Maas, co-founder of MVRDV Architects in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
“The media lab is not only about gaining facility with new tools, techniques and methodologies,” MacKeith pointed out. “It’s about stepping back, observing what is being produced and developing the critical perspective and critical language with which to evaluate it.”
Sung Ho Kim, assistant professor of architecture, often works at the intersection of emerging technology and design practice. One ongoing studio, which includes students from architecture, engineering and computer science, involves developing a prototype “moveable wall” that twists and bends to the movements of one’s hand.
Kim, who directs the digital media and design curriculum, noted that artists are classic “early adopters,” frequently pioneering — and popularizing — new uses for existing technologies.
“Technology is always advancing; that’s just a fact,” he said. “But usage often lags behind. Most people become the victim of technology. They just do what the software allows them to do.
“We want students to develop the analytical ability to deploy technology in new and unexpected ways.”
Other studios are incorporating new technology alongside traditional equipment. The Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Studio for the Illustrated Book — which recently relocated from West Campus to the Sam Fox School’s new Earl E. and Myrtle E. Walker Hall — houses paper cutters, letterpresses, etching presses and a large collection of movable type. It also includes computer stations and a high-tech photopolymer platemaker.
“The computer functions as a kind of type foundry,” explained director Ken Botnick. “Whatever you can make in a computer, we can output to film and expose to a photopolymer relief plate, which can then be printed on the letterpress.
“In a couple of hours you go from current technology to a 500-year-old technology.”
The Kranzberg studio is also home to the first dedicated Sam Fox School course, “Urban Books: Imag(in)ing St. Louis.” Now in its third year, “Urban Books” is co-taught by Zeuler Lima, Ph.D., assistant professor of architecture, and Jana Harper, lecturer in book arts. Students — representing virtually all Sam Fox School areas as well as Arts & Sciences — explore the modern city and its dizzying tangle of geography, history, cultures and infrastructure through the medium of fine art bookmaking.
“The studio offers a very rich tutorial environment,” said Jeff Pike, dean of Art. “Students listen and take notes but they also have to process information and make something with it. That’s a very different way of working, and a very effective way of teaching,”
This semester marks the debut of a new collaborative course, “Studio/Seminar: History and Practice of Printmaking.” Led by Lisa Bulawsky, associate professor of printmaking in the College of Art, and Elizabeth Childs, Ph.D., associate professor of art history & archaeology in Arts & Sciences, it merges scholarly lectures and study with hands-on research in three printmaking media: woodcut, intaglio and lithography.
‘Amazing dexterity’
“Art students often find a disconnection between their work in the studio and the lineage and continuum of their medium,” Bulawsky said. “Art history students are often disconnected from the actual object, its maker and its making. This course allows both to see the bigger picture. So far they’re handling it with amazing dexterity and creativity.”
In conjunction with the class, Bulawsky and Childs have curated an exhibition for the Kemper Art Museum’s Teaching Gallery. “Pressing Issues: The Cultural Agency of Prints”opens Oct. 25 and includes roughly 30 works — drawn from the Kemper Art Museum, Olin Library and the Saint Louis Art Museum — spanning the history of the medium. Artists range from Martin Schongauer and Rembrandt van Rijn to Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, Kathe Kollwitz, Andy Warhol and Sue Coe.
“We’re looking at the political, cultural and satirical edge of printmaking,” Childs explained. “Because of their multiplicity and ease of circulation, prints can build community sentiment, shape public debate or critique a more hegemonic set of values.”
Early examples demonstrate the print’s role in circulating imagery, particularly religious imagery, prior to photography. Moving into the modern age, the curators juxtapose socially engaged critiques such as William Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress (1732) and Hung Liu’s Trademark (1992) — which, though created two centuries apart, both address the exploitation of women by prostitution.
Meanwhile, Coe’s Thank You America (1991) — published (like Trademark) by the Sam Fox School’s Island Press — addresses the theatrics of contemporary politics by rendering Anita Hill’s questioning before Congress as a modern-day Salem witch trial.
“For their final project, students will write a research paper evaluating one print from the Kemper exhibition, then conceive an original work that somehow engages it both thematically and technically,” Childs noted. “In the final critique they’ll present their project in the museum space, next to the print that inspired it.
“For me — and I think for Lisa too — what’s thrilling about this course is that it brings a very fresh perspective to each of our respective fields,” Childs continued. “For students, we hope it makes the objects they study come alive.
“Moving between the studio, the classroom and the museum invites them to think not only more critically about their own work, but also about the relationship of contemporary practice to the larger history of printmaking,” she concluded.
“It’s an evolving and dynamic medium.”