Portraits
of the Artist as Teacher
The potter takes a shapeless mass of clay, adds a little water and spins the material on the wheel. As the clay rotates, the artist applies pressure at certain points, creating a shape that rises into being under the insistent touch of the potter.
The painter starts from a single brushstroke. With a vision for the finished piece, the artist builds the image through addition, improving the composition bit by bit, adding color or painting over a miscalculation, until the final product emerges as a new idea, full of possibility.
These methods of creating art could also be a metaphor for creating artists, as students accumulate knowledge bit by bit until they feel confident to tackle something original, or they learn a skill and respond to the gentle shaping and pressure applied by a patient mentor. At Juniata, art students have been responding for the past three decades to the specific methods of two seminal artists: Jack Troy and Alexander "Sandy McBride.
Not surprisingly, both men found their teaching styles slowly, discarding what didn't work and adding new challenges every year. "I began to see that art was about something beyond art, McBride explains. "It has more to do with life experiences. It's not important to learn all the techniques, it's important to learn how artists think-how they look at the world.
Troy, who came to Juniata in 1967 as a professor of English, found that teaching students to use their hands as instruments for change was more rewarding than exploring his own considerable gifts as a ceramic artist. "Ceramic pieces are tangible products and students can chart their progress, Troy says. "It's an incremental skill. It's about life-you have more to say as you go on.
"The biggest kick I get from teaching is working with students who don't think they can do art-and by the end of the semester they are really swinging.
- -Sandy McBride
Troy started his ceramics career after he graduated from college, while teaching at a Media, Pa. high school. He often talked with the school's art teacher and eventually asked if he could take a turn on the wheel. "I tell my students that no one has taken as long to learn the wheel as I did, he says. "I still have the first bowl I made. It's not a great bowl, but it makes everything I made after it look pretty darn good!
McBride arrived on campus in 1970 after teaching at New Hampshire's Keene State College and Vermont's Green Mountain College. His heroes were abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem DeKooning and Robert Motherwell, but he had always been able to draw from life. He won several high school art awards and received a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design and went on to graduate school at Cornell University.
At Juniata he taught painting, printmaking, photography and other courses, and found a teaching style based on straightforward honesty. "I taught what I knew and what I believed, he recalls. "If I didn't know the answer, I always said so. I figure it's OK not to know everything, and I think the students respect me for that. He also started to team-teach general education courses, where he absorbed knowledge from other disciplines.
"As a teacher he left a lot unexplained and at times was deliberately obscure or vague, says Nathan Wagoner 80, Juniata's instructional systems developer, who started his art career after studying photography with McBride. "He set the bar pretty high aesthetically and we were all very competitive at trying to impress him.
Troy's role models were the many potters he had worked with. Although he had taken classes at Philadelphia College of Art, he had always admired the communal nature of ceramics. "With ceramics everything people make is new, I still love to go into the studio and see what people have made, he says. "My job is to introduce people to an art medium and give them problems to solve.
"Jack challenged you to stretch and allowed you to find your own space, explains Steve dePerrot '84, who operates Pots by dePerrot gallery and studio in Lititz, Pa. Another alumnus, Evan Jones '76, who operates a painting business and Evan Jones Gallery 302 in Boca Raton, Fla., agrees: "Jack had very high expectations and if you didn't live up to them, he let you know. As a professor, to his credit, he never stopped growing and developing. To me he's like a great football or basketball coach, working under him is not easy and it shouldn't be.
Over the years Troy has introduced thousands of Juniatians to ceramics and has perfected a program that is intensely familial. Much of that is attributable to Troy's teaching methods, which emphasize community. "The studio is a kind of family. The older students help the beginners. It's the one-room schoolhouse theory of teaching, he says. Always curious about new methods, Troy introduced the anagama kiln to Juniata in 1978. The wood-fired kiln requires four to five days to fire ceramics, a marathon that requires a group effort of wood-stoking, monitoring and camaraderie.
The Art of Giving
Learning studio art at Juniata, beginning with Steve Barbash in the 1960s, has been a significant college experience for countless alumni. Barbash reinstituted drawing, etching and painting classes in the studio area of Carnegie Hall. Since then, Sandy McBride and Jack Troy have carried on, adding photography and ceramics to the curriculum. Over the years, students sparked a lifelong passion for art after their time with Sandy and Jack.
Many alumni have extended this interest by building modest or sometimes substantial art collections of their own. Often alumni seek to honor the College by donating art or collections that can be of significant educational value. Indeed, much of the art museum's permanent collection-including 300-plus works in the Stottlemyer Collection, the collection of 50-plus works by German artist Gunther Spaltmann, and a collection of Navajo weavings-was donated by alumni or friends.
Jack and Sandy also have donated works to the College. Both artists are represented in the museum's permanent collection and their art complements various offices on campus.
Troy's ceramics courses even inspired a unique gift. Three years ago, Jack challenged a group of students to create sculpture of biological life forms. He asked them to transform visual information about principles of growth and structure into creatures real and imagined. "This work was the equivalent of writing poetry in a language that is not your native tongue Jack says.
The finished works were displayed in the von Liebig Science Center Lobby and did not go unnoticed. In fact, the biology faculty members were so impressed, they collectively made a donation to the College to purchase many of the pieces for the permanent collection. They continue to be on display in the lobby.
-Marsha Hartman '70, director of development
"When you see all the pieces come out of the anagama, people don't say I made that.' They always say We did that,' Troy says.
Juniata's historic pot shop will disappear in fall 2006, to be replaced by space in the former biology wing of Brumbaugh Academic Center. A new kiln will debut in a small building outside Brumbaugh.
The two small bathrooms in the Oller Hall foyer have been replaced with offices for theatre staff. The memorably cramped original bathrooms have been superceded by spacious new restrooms in the wonderfully open Esther Doyle lobby.
Both artists see value in being a vibrant part of the liberal arts community at the College, teaching students from different disciplines to create a personal vision in clay, paint, or through a lens. "The biggest kick I get from teaching is working with students who don't think they can do art-and by the end of the semester they are really swinging, McBride says. Troy agrees, saying "Taking a drink from a cup you have made is a powerful metaphor, and, when people respond to something you have made, that is a kind of communication.
The potter and the painter continue to teach at Juniata, but on a reduced schedule. Troy continues to bring new potters into his informal family at the workshops he gives across the country and internationally. McBride is clearing out his home studio in preparation to start marketing his work to galleries and exhibitions. Both urge present and past students to learn as much as they can from others.
"The more you want to learn, the more teachers you should have, Troy advises. "One person can't know it all. Contradictory teaching teaches you to find your own solutions to things.
"I tell my students that no one has taken as long to learn the wheel as I did. I still have the first bowl I made. It's not a great bowl, but it makes everything I made after it look pretty darn good!-Jack Troy