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From Exeter to Evanston
But he could not refuse the position of full professor and chair of the art department at Northwestern University. The university president, who knew Folds' mother, had heard raves about Folds' Exeter classes from his son's college roommate and lured him west to Illinois. In 1946, Folds moved with his family to Evanston, where his parents had been living for decades. He reorganized the department, revamped the curriculum and offered the university's first course on contemporary art, as well as courses in Impressionism and early modern art and architecture.
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While at Exeter, Folds wrote and illustrated a children's book,
Where Is the Fire? |
Twelve years later he moved to New York to become dean of education at the Metropolitan Museum, the most prestigious and visible museum education position in the nation. The job had been offered to art critic and historian John Canaday, Folds' roommate at the Yale Art School, and Canaday recommended Folds for the job. Among the museum trustees who interviewed Folds for the position was Exeter benefactor Edward Harkness. During twelve years as dean of education at the Met, Folds expanded the educational role of the museum, directed graduate courses in curatorial studies and oversaw an expanding program of art education for children. He was a legendary lecturer at the Met and around the country, and an innovator in the use of technology for art education, developing the nation's first recorded tours for museum visitors, the prototype for today's ubiquitous Acoustaguides. He also created and starred in the first demonstrations of art techniques on television, on "The Bell Telephone Hour." Around the time of the thaw in the Cold War, Folds chaired the first international conference on museum education in Moscow. In 1972 he retired from the Met, but he continued to lecture there into the 1990s.
In his twelve years at Exeter, Folds found his calling as a teacher and advocate for visual education. The philosophy he articulated at Exeter, in a series of articles for this Bulletin and the nationally circulated Magazine of Art, and later in his career still resounds among arts advocates. To others it may still sound radical. Art, he wrote, "must be recognized as a fundamental, not an ornamental subject." Folds remains convinced that students should continue art classes from preschool through high school, because "school can educate their senses just as it educates their minds." Furthermore, art training "develops mental discipline, perceptual skill and.imaginative thinking." The imperatives for such learning are moral as well as aesthetic. He argued, "If knowledge of one's environment-its possibilities of growth as a background for democratic culture-is a desirable aim, then education of vision is surely indispensable." He even declared that "discriminating appreciation of color and form is absolutely essential to ordinary intelligent citizenship."
How successful was Tom Folds in his campaign to change people's attitudes toward the visual arts? Exeter now offers 15 full-credit, term-length courses in studio art. There are beginning and advanced courses in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and architecture, as well as a general introduction to two- and three-dimensional design, printmaking and opportunities for advance independent study. In addition to an introductory survey of the history of art, there are specialized courses in Impressionism, 20th-century art and history of photography. The Lamont Gallery presents an ambitious program of exhibitions and activities throughout the school year, and the Michael C. Rockefeller '56 Visiting Artists Fund regularly brings professional artists to campus to meet and work with students. Tom Folds, through his example and his eloquent testimony of 60 years past, makes the case for how fundamental the study of art is to the pursuit of knowledge and goodness: "For without knowledge of it, no boy has learned how to use his eyes."
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ART AT THE ACADEMY TODAY
BARBARA JENNY '84:
'Coming to the Studio Is Always a Joy'
 | | Barbara Jenny |
Barbara Jenny knows what it's like to be an art student at Exeter. After all, not so long ago, she was one herself, a prep hunched over a drafting table in Nick Dawson's beginning and advanced architecture classes. At the end of the year, Dawson politely but firmly insisted that Jenny branch out a little and "go paint."
Jenny has been doing so ever since-at Dartmouth (and now as a part-time grad student at Maine College of Art), while serving as director of the Exeter Center for Creative Arts, and, since 1994, while teaching painting, drawing and photography at the Academy. Like the classes she teaches, she moves freely and fluently between media: "I love the idea that you can make what needs to be made in the material that needs to be used," says Jenny, who shows her work at the Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery in Portsmouth, NH, and elsewhere in northern New England.
Jenny not only learned how to paint at Exeter, she also learned some valuable lessons about how to teach, many of them from adjunct teacher Diane Martin, who managed to be, says her pupil, "both supportive and demanding." As a case in point, Jenny recalls the time that Martin "took away my tools"-the rulers and straight edges she used to create her painstakingly precise homages to Frank Stella and Barnett Newman. It was a little scary, Jenny says, but "it was great. I had to try something new."
As a teacher herself, Jenny says her first goal is "to get students into the classroom." During her own student days in the 1980s, Jenny says she felt encouraged to pursue a variety of interests; by contrast, she says, today's students "seem to feel a lot of pressure to take courses that will look good on their transcripts." Paradoxically, Jenny is convinced that one of the reasons she thrived at Exeter was precisely because she "had the chance to make art." That, she says, is what she wishes for her own students, that they learn the satisfactions, and the discipline, of being creative, of learning why "two very different drawings can both be successful, because everyone has their own way of seeing, of making art."
Once students do make it to the airy, high-celinged classrooms and studios of the Frederick R. Mayer Art Center, Jenny figures she's got 'em hooked. The light is good, the mood expansive. "For me as a student," says Jenny, "coming to the studio was always a joy," a calm refuge amid a sometimes hectic campus. "To this day," she says, "I tell students, 'Come to the studio. Know that this is a special building, built for you. Use it.'"
- by Beth Brosnan
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