The Shock of the New

Folds' taste for modern and contemporary art delighted most students. One awkward moment in the art history class reveals the extent to which student taste sometimes coincided with the teacher's: "I showed a black-and-white reproduction of a Vlamink still life that I had seen in Paris over the summer. I was explaining the colors of the picture, which were particularly nice for the artist. In the back of the class, two students were laughing a bit. It turned out that one of them had purchased the painting in Paris with his parents a month after I saw it, and had it hanging in his dorm room."

Not everyone embraced modern art, however. Dr. Perry called Folds in one day and a debate on the merits of the Old Masters and the Moderns ensued:

"Tom," Perry said, "I would like to ask you a question. Do you believe there is any art that is worthwhile before Cézanne? People here think you are only interested in modern."

"No," Folds replied, "I am interested in the old just as much. More, in fact. One of my great heroes is Piero della Francesca, and besides, my wife is an art historian."

Perry paused. "Well, then," he said. "Would you be interested in a Delacroix?"

Sure enough, Dr. Perry had a friend with a beautiful Delacroix, which he loaned for exhibition in the gallery and, reports Folds, "everybody loved it."

Folds became known for speaking his mind. He recalls a warning from Mr. Cushwa following his first year at the academy and his engagement to Kitty: "You are a little too outspoken sometimes when you are in somebody's living room and they ask your opinion on an etching or something of that sort. You have to watch that, you know. But with Kitty here, I think that will be under control." Kitty Folds became not only a tempering influence but also a collaborator. "She was the one who was an expert at hanging pictures," Tom recalls.

Although he was given a studio in the Academy building, Tom's own artistic production declined after he arrived at Exeter. "From time to time I tried to do some drawing, but I never really kept the thing going," he says. "I didn't do any finished pictures. It's just as well, because I don't see how I could have had time to paint while bringing up a family and teaching art history as well as studio." He did produce one significant independent work at Exeter, a charming children's book entitled Where Is the Fire, published by Houghton Mifflin after Folds left Exeter for Northwestern.

By the start of World War II, Folds had earned a national reputation as an art educator. He met the legendary artist and teacher Joseph Albers during Albers' visit to campus with Dr. Perry, and the two became good friends. Albers stayed with the Foldses several times in subsequent years, and eventually offered Tom a position teaching drawing and art history at Black Mountain College, at that time the most progressive art program in the United States. Folds turned it down, however. "I couldn't do it, because we now had children and it was too much. It wasn't enough money, either." Folds also turned down an assistant professorship at Harvard, because he did not want to split his duties between the art and architecture schools.

ART AT THE ACADEMY TODAY

RON BURKE:
'A Deep Commitment to the Material'

Ron Burke

Some artists might find teaching a burden, the thing that stands between them and their art. Ceramicist Ron Burke is not one of those artists. "I think my students have inspired me," he says, gesturing to some of his recent pieces, handsome stoneware vases that have the quiet but commanding presence of sculpture. "I really benefit from watching my students' approach to clay, from their fresh ideas and energy."

In return, Burke offers his pupils not only instruction, but also the example of what it means to be a working artist. While Burke has taught art at every level from kindergarten through grad school, he has devoted most of his career to (and supported his family by) working as a professional studio potter. "When you work eight, 10, 12 hours a day on your craft, you just have a different understanding of it," he says. "You develop a deep commitment to the material."

Burke came relatively late to his life's calling. After getting his BS in education at SUNY-Oswego, he began taking courses at the Munson Williams Proctor Museum School in the late 1950s. The painting and sculpture classes were full, so he enrolled in ceramics, and "that," he says, "was it." What Burke responded to was "the whole tactile quality of the clay," as well as the fact that ceramics can be both fine art and infinitely practical, that his pieces can be used as well as admired. He went on to earn his MFA from the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art, and to teach at the University of Manitoba, the Penland (NC) School of Crafts and a number of other institutions before coming to Phillips Exeter in the late 1990s, first as a guest curator, then as the Michael J. Rockefeller '56 artist-in-residence and, most recently, as an instructor.

Burke describes himself as a traditional, fundamentals-first kind of teacher: "You have to have technique, or you can't go anywhere. Once you have the [technical] foundation, then you can explore yourself and your environment. I try very hard to impart that to my students here." At the start of each term, he tells his students that while "they won't write a single paper," the course will be challenging, demanding and quite possibly transforming: "I just know that if I get 13 students in a class, I can work with them to get them to delve into a place inside themselves they rarely touch." Working with clay, smashing it down, shaping it, "squeezing some of your personality and ideas into it," can, Burke believes, change lives in unforeseen ways: "Who knows? Maybe that creative experience will expand their thinking, and help them close a deal or argue a case-or even arrange a one-person show of their work."

- by Beth Brosnan

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