Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Immersion Travel Art Academy

I’ve long dreamed of a multi-campus, graduate-studies-only traveling art school. Imagine a three-year academy that only offers graduate studies in Studio Art, Literature and Philosophy in the environment of multiple international campuses.

Faculty and students both rotate in a fashion that allows maximum exposure to new environments and unsullied faculty-student interaction for everyone involved. Start with a base campus in a small yet influential art market; and have required rotations in foreign regions. The purpose of the school during the first two years is to maximize a meditative response to unfamiliar surroundings, occasionally the campuses are located in metropolitan areas, but mostly they are in small vistas. Students would work off-campus within the communities in order to better understand their subjects. The final year, would be stateside focusing on the completion of studies with an added emphasis in marketing, so that students graduate with the ability to actually make a living from their artwork – rather than finding themselves forced to fight for a tenure-track community college position with 500 other MFA graduates.

The non-base-campus schools would change every year, so that faculty, as well as students will never repeat a location. So for instance:

Year One: small Japanese village

Year Two: Italian hillside community

Year Three: Stateside main campus (ex. Taos)

Year Four: Oceanside community in Costa Rica

Year Five: village in Ireland

Year Six: Stateside main campus (ex. Taos)

It may take a decade or two, but I believe one day it will happen. – DN

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