| Presidents
Series:
President David Rhodes: School of Visual Arts
by Jacob
M. Appel
A visit to the
office of David Rhodes is a crash-course reminder that our lives
have become increasingly oriented to the visual. From his own
professional quality photographs of sea turtles and manatees—although
he insists that he is only an amateur—to the design projects of
his former students, the walls and shelves are lined with tributes
to the increasing ubiquity of imagery in our daily lives. Rhodes,
the President of the School of Visual Arts, draws more evidence
from the nightly news. “The person who saw the beating of Rodney
King would not have been believed if not for that videotape,”
he explained. “Viet Nam was a living room war—but on thirty-six
hour delay. Now it’s instantaneous. It’s live. Whatever happens
happens.” He views part of his mission as a college president
as that of training the young men and women who will shape this
visual world in the future.
When the School
of Arts was originally founded in 1947—the collective effort
of David’s father, Silas H. Rhodes, and Tarzan illustrator
Burne Hogarth—it was known as the Cartoonists’ and Illustrators’ School.
“It was what was known as a GI school,” Rhodes explained. “Most
of the students were returning veterans.” In the fifty years
that have followed, the school has evolved rapidly in both
size and
the diversity of course offerings. “The greatest challenge of
my career,” added Rhodes, “has been seeing our transformation
from an art school with three year courses to an art college
with
graduate programs.” The school changed its name in 1956 and began
to offer BFA degrees in 1972. The first MFA programs were accredited
a decade later. Now the school offers undergraduate programs
in advertising and graphic design, fine arts, illustration and
cartooning, interior
design, photography, computer art, film video and animation. The
graduate school menu includes programs
in fine arts, illustration as visual essay, computer arts, photography
and related media, and design. In addition to the BFA and MFA
degrees, the School of Visual Arts also award a Masters of Professional
Studies in art therapy and has recently established a MAT program
for future teachers. “We’ve become an important member of the
arts community and also of the art education community,” noted
Rhodes. “And it has all occurred rapidly over the past two
decades.”
One of the most
significant changes has been in the composition of the student
body. “Our undergraduates are more and more like college kids
everywhere,” observed Rhodes. And demographically, this may be
true. They are exceedingly geographically and ethnically diverse:
50% come from outside the New York Metropolitan Area, more than
30% are racial minorities and 15% are foreign. At the graduate
level, nearly half the students are from abroad—which Rhodes pointed
out, is “not untypical” for such programs in the United States.
One third of the school’s 3000 undergraduates now live on campus.
Yet there is something distinctive about School of the Visual
Arts students. “They bring something with them when they come
in and they take it with them when they come out,” observed the
college’s president. “That is that they’re focused. They tend
to be much more focused than your typical undergraduate at a typical
liberal arts college.” Students are admitted directly to a specific
program and many know their long-term career goals from the outset.
These might include a job in industry, either of the sort with
“a title on a desk” like those of art directors or free-lance
positions such as editors, or on to graduate school. Many School
of Visual Arts students continue their graduate studies at the
institution; among the other popular choices are Yale, Rutgers,
UC-Davis and Columbia. Celebrated graduates include the artists
behind Mad Magazine and the illustrator Paul Davis.
Although the economic
recession and the dot-com bust have witnessed some decline in
the number of students majoring in design and computer art, graphic
design remains the school’s most popular program. That may be,
in part, because the field itself is broadening. “It used to be
anything that was done on a flat page was designed by a graphic
designer,” Rhodes elaborated. “Now it’s anything done on a flat
page, anything on a screen. And it’s no longer just static. We
have a whole series of courses that, for lack of a better term,
are digital video and they’re moving pages.” As a result, “the
boundaries between the various disciplines are becoming more and
more blurred as the world becomes more and more digital.” Rhodes
offered several examples: “It’s suddenly become much easier, if
you’re a photography major, to slide over into video—which is
really photography at thirty frames per second. And if you’re
in design, it becomes much easier to slide over into interactive
work on the web.” The opportunities for study are expansive, yet
these rapid developments pose a challenge to educators. “All of
this certainly makes life interesting,” said Rhodes. “You’re constantly
changing the curriculum.”
Rhodes—after the
caveat that predicting trends is difficult—prophesies an increase
of interest in illustration. “A couple of years ago we saw a diminution
of interest in drawing, but that has rebounded,” he observed.
“What I think we’ll see is, for the near term, a return to doing
more work by hand. It has a human touch to it—it’s something that
you can’t imitate as readily…. There’s something you cannot yet
duplicate on the screen very well that you can do by hand, that
you can do readily with pen and paper.” Among the various examples
of such work are Francisco Goya’s “Disasters of War,” political
cartoons, and graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus. He
also added some praise for Walt Disney. “The real beauty of Disney
is that the animation is splendid, done with extraordinary care,
as opposed to the Saturday morning cartoons that are just slapped
together.” Yet Disney cartoons “start off as hand drawings.” Rhodes
expressed his confidence that illustration—what he calls “storytelling
in pictures”—“may go out of fashion, but it never goes out of
favor.” Not only was drawing at the heart of the original school’s
mission, it remains “at the core” of today’s multidisciplinary
college.
Additional expansion
appears to be in the school’s future. “My main goal going forward
is to ensure the continued increase in the reputations of our
programs,” explained Rhodes. “At the moment that primarily entails
us finding additional space, really a building for the graduate
programs.” He would also like to add a library and a theater suitable
for a film festival. In the longer term, he’d like to add new
academic programs. “We need something in advertising at the graduate
level, something in copy writing at the graduate level. We need
to do a small graduate level film program. And at the undergraduate
level, we need to do something more substantial in product design.
I also want to do a writing program in criticism. I think that
would be an interesting addition to what we do here. We have a
large art history program, but we don’t do enough yet in critical
writing.” Rhodes is also exploring on-line learning options.
The college president
began his own education as a student of philosophy. He graduated
from the College of Letters at Wesleyan and then studied at Columbia
University. At the same time, he began a teaching career in the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. As he became increasingly
interested in issues of social justice, he shifted his studies
toward economics. Yet as an eldest son, he knew that he would
follow in his father’s footsteps and head the School of Visual
Arts. “That gave me a certain kind of freedom,” he observed, “to
study things that from a monetary perspective might be useless.”
Yet these are the very sorts of things—philosophy, the western
tradition—that one would hope to find readily at the fingertips
of a college president.#
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