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| Cover design, Marie Doucette |
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I've been on both sides of the coin: as a S.U.N.Y. student ( State University of New York at Oneonta ), and enrolled as a transfer at a posh private school. Both were excellent experiences for me, in different ways. Through my subsidized and cheap State school, I got a basic liberal arts education that's better than your average artist. My parents believed quite strongly that a young person, especially a teenager, should be grounded in reading and writing, hallmarks of a solid education, and they were right. ( Dad, this is the spot where you and Mom are thanked. No, I didn't choke typing these words :)
Besides, I was only 17 when I went off to college. That's far too young to specialize, though I have always known my destiny was to become an artist, even when the where, how, and why of it were totally obscured for me. I had the drive and the hunger, eager to learn whatever I could, that's all I knew. At the time, I was in a S.U.N.Y. program called "3-to-1", in partnership with F.I.T. ( Fashion Institute of Technology ), for a randomly picked major called Advertising Design. I would earn a Bachelor's Degree and an Associate's Degree in 4 years, upon completion of the program requirements. It seemed like a sure thing towards getting a job right away, or so I thought at the time. After a stint working in the periodicals section of the campus library, I started reading trade magazines like Step-by Step Graphics.
I knew I was doing fairly well in my classes, so I started thinking that maybe I could go farther than I originally intended. At the time, my father was starting his business, which made money for school scarce, and my decision to diverge from the original plan harder to make. On a rainy night, I called my father from a pay phone and told him that I thought I could do better than the second S.U.N.Y. school I would be going to. He asked me what the #1 art school in the country was. I said I'd have to go to the library to find out. I did, and I called him back from the same pay phone, "It's the Rhode Island School of Design." He said to me, "OK. You get into that one, and I'll help you out." And so I did. I sent applications and my portfolio to the better technical schools for art and design. I got accepted to every school and program that I applied to.
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| Me with some classmates and my mentor, at our graduation party. |
Once there, I had to fulfill studio classes addressing their basic requirements in art ( credits from the S.U.N.Y art classes were null and void ), before buckling down to a major. R.I.S.D. ( pronounced "ris-dee" for Rhode Island School of Design ) believes a well-rounded artist should be able to speak through the language of whatever medium is available to them. Students must take inter-disciplinary classes during "Wintersession", that typically fallow time between semesters, when it is mandatory to take classes outside of one's major. Since I already had my liberal arts requirements, I could only take studio classes ( 3 hour classes each, with a lot of art assignments for homework ), in order to graduate quicker. It was a harder course load than the other students, and I knew it. But what could I do? The clock was ticking, so I pushed myself as hard as I could. To get an easy "A" and to give myself a bit of a break, I would occasionally take an art history class, because all I had to do was attend, take some notes or a quick test, and write a paper. Ahhhh.
R.I.S.D. believes in building artists for life, not for a specific job or career, and they are right to do it that way. The focus is to create an artist who will pick up any tool placed in front of them and utilize it, while still retaining their voice. Powerful stuff. And pricey at that. In addition to financial help from my family, ( only one scholarship was available in my major, and an older, married student already secured it, even though her husband was well paid as a full-time computer consultant ), I worked a handful of jobs: at a pizza place, as a darkroom monitor, and as a teaching assistant for the Continuing Education students taking
Intro to Photography, while painting houses on the side with a housemate during summer session.
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| Me in '93, learning the trade. |
Which brings me to the subject of Ivory Towers. The "Occupy" movement has done what any great protest should. It started with a wide premise that people are now applying to the specific and the individual. I know that the financial system of Capitalism has been designed by a very small percentage of businessman who devise and pass legal rules and regulations to create a complicated labyrinth through which they can make money. It's ridiculous. It would be akin to making Rupert Murdoch take a manually-operated camera, snap professional-quality photos, develop them by hand in a darkroom the old-fashioned way, then layout the book or magazine after writing all the articles, which, by the way, I clearly know how to do, since you, the reader, can bear witness to that. So. Who is more skilled?
You know the answer to that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch
In my case, the industry I first started working in, after graduation, was publishing, as a production assistant. I'll write more on that later, but suffice to say, I was overjoyed. I love books. Reading is my passion. To be able to fulfill my life's work and vocation through a job gave me a feeling of satisfaction, of the planets aligning, making all that hard work fit into place. This is what I was meant to do. Book publishing, like many erudite industries, is created from intellectual and artistic capital. Oftentimes, that currency comes from the Ivy League schools, those bastions of snobbery that formed themselves architecturally ( in some cases ) into actual towers, like the turrets of the buildings where students take classes.
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| Me as a design manager in '94. |
The problem remains that middle-class and working class students entering these fields have to try and earn a living next to "trust-fund babies" who were never expected to earn. A blue-blood with a "Lit" ( literature ) degree from an Ivy, in the employ of a gentleman's field like publishing, is all that's required from their family to maintain their respectability and social standing. Clearly this is not the case for me, nor many of the other workers in publishing. While media moguls receive the lion's share of the profits made off of our work capital, we struggle for the basics, like health care insured at reasonable rates, maternity leave, childcare, paid vacations, and a decent salary.
Until the industry revises itself, and adjusts it's attitude to be reflective of the 21st century, it will continue it's downward spiral towards irrelevance, while something else springs up in the void to take its place. My path in life is to create work that I can share with the world, accessible to anyone who looks for it, and publishing houses used to be a conduit for artists to do that. We made the work, and they sold the books. It was a great equation. And mutually beneficial. But until the inequities remain unresolved, their greatest asset, We the intellectual capital, will be forced to move on to other industries.
My starting salary as a production assistant
for a major publisher in 1993 was $17,500.
