2008 Woodie Awards
OPINION: Art department holds Whitworth's future
Elizabeth Johnson, Staff WriterThe Fine Arts Building houses more than creepy sculptures, bizarre still lifes and haunted studios. It holds the future of Whitworth.
If Whitworth lost the art department, the school would be completely different. Many students at Whitworth don't give the art building, or the department for that matter, a second look. Sure, you walk by it, or maybe even through it as a pre-frosh or incoming freshman on a campus tour and then forget it even exists.
The art department sculpts the kind of critical thinking the rest of the school is trying so hard to eke out of its students. They don’t give you a four-page rubric for a one-page paper in the art department. You are expected to think critically, to make connections between what you see in the world and what you think about it. “My rubrics are a little less detailed than you’d get in a core class,” associate professor of art Scott Kolbo said.
You can’t make a rubric for a good painting. You could fulfill everything the professor asks for and still make a horrible painting. If Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp had followed rubrics they probably wouldn’t have had the impact they did on the art world.
That’s the thing about art that Whitworth can’t lose. Art has gray areas, just like the real world. There are no rubrics for life. There are suggestions perhaps, but you can’t just follow a rubric and hope everything turns out. Disasters happen, messes are made, mistakes rear their ugly heads and we need to learn how to deal with them. “In art you get your hands dirty, make messes. It’s about trying stuff, seeing what happens and reacting,” Kolbo said.
Art allows that kind of experience to be had in a tactile way. There will be crises and you will need to think creatively and critically to solve them.
Yet, the art building isn’t just a place where paint stained introspective beatniks sit around pondering how well forest green goes with cerulean and how much glitter sucks…at least not all the time. Kolbo is fully in support of the analytic academic programs on campus because they make art students broaden their horizons. Ultimately, being able to write well and to articulate thoughts and ideas will help students make better art. “Students think it’ll be relaxing to just come in and make stuff but you have to be critical and critique your work,” Kolbo said.
There’s always a tension between creativity and grading art, despite generations of art students grumbling about how grading art is bologna. “You have to grade it, you can’t just make everyone feel good about themselves and give them an ‘A’. You could dumb the class down but does that help art students make better art?” Kolbo said.
Not only is art itself vital to Whitworth, both the art faculty and students themselves give Whitworth something nothing else could offer it. Art students are consistently pushing the envelope and challenging the rest of the campus to peer out of its little Christian sanctuary to consider larger issues. The art faculty encourages and facilitates that as well. They push students to create interesting and unique art. Not only do they want you to create successful a successful image but they want to you create an image with meaningful content. There’s just not a checklist for great art with great content.
Next year, despite considerable budget and square footage cuts, the brand new visual arts building will open. Art students will probably continue to print, paint, draw and sculpt as they always have. They don’t really care about the details, they have their niche and their art and will probably continue to pester you with those annoying thought-provoking items they spend late nights crafting. “I don’t know what the future will be necessarily, but we’re at a big moment in time for the department. I don’t think a whole lot will change for the art students though, except there will be less rat droppings on your paintings,” Kolbo said.
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