The names of important local, national and even international artists who have studied, taught or guest-lectured at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in its 150-year history could fill a book.
A quick few: Frank Duveneck, Julian Stanczak, Jim Dine, Charley and Edie Harper, Maybelle Richardson Stamper, Jim Flora, Paul Chidlaw, Petah Coyne, Emily Hanako Momohara, John Ruthven, Thom Shaw, Josef Albers, Maria Longworth Nichols Storer, Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Tom Bacher, Chris Sickels, Tom Wesselmann, Elizabeth Nourse, Richard Felton Outcault… you get the idea.
But, strangely, there never has been a published book — until now. Getting a jump on the upcoming 2019 sesquicentennial, Art Academy 150: Make Art. Make a Difference was just released with a celebratory party at Rookwood Pottery on Oct. 27. The initial printing consists of 200 numbered copies, each in a 9-inch square format with an angle-cut, upper-right corner — a traditional Art Academy graphic style.
It was written by local historian Jeff Suess and designed by Art Academy graduate Steve Weinstein of Envoi Design. Joan Kaup, who had the idea for the publication, served as publisher/managing editor.
The book chronicles the school’s journey during its 150 years — starting in 1869 as the independent, downtown-based McMicken School of Design; becoming part of the new University of Cincinnati in 1871; changing its name to the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1887 after leaving UC to partner with the new Cincinnati Art Museum and have its own building on that institution’s idyllic Eden Park campus; separating from the museum to move in 2005 to former commercial buildings at 1212 Jackson St. in what was then still-gritty, not-yet-chic Over-the-Rhine.
“Saturday night at the book launch, I had a feeling I never felt before,” says Mark Grote, the school’s interim president since John Sullivan retired in June. “It was a humbling experience to see all in one place what this college has been for 150 years. That’s a humbling experience for me to know (while) helping us figure out what the future is going to be.”
Grote believes the book also helps the Art Academy — an accredited nonprofit independent institution with some 200 undergraduates and big plans for growth — get the word out about itself to the city-at-large. “Not enough people know who the Art Academy is and the incredible impact we’ve had on this city and even on art throughout the country and in some cases the world,” he says.
“There’s a story in the book that one of our graduates from a long time ago is one of the first people to actually create the idea of a comic strip,” he continues, providing an example of one the school’s little-known highlights. “You can almost trace back comic strips to an Art Academy grad. And there are other stories like that. So having this book is our way of telling people who we are and what we’re proud of.”
That student, by the way, was Richard Felton Outcault, who studied at the Academy from 1878-81, when it was called the McMicken School of Design. As the new book tells it — by inventively using a comic book form designed by Marlowe Wesley — Outcault in 1896 drew a cartoon for The New York Journal, “The Yellow Kid and His New Phonograph,” that had “all the hallmarks of comic strips.” Its immediate popularity inspired other papers to follow and a new graphic-art form was born.
Outcault also was friends with another student, John Augustus Knapp, who himself has a unique claim to fame. He created the fantastical illustrations for visionary Cincinnati pharmacist John Uri Lloyd’s first novel, 1895’s mystical Etidorhpa: or, the end of the earth: the strange history of a mysterious being and the account of a remarkable journey. It has come to be considered one of the great — if difficult to read — American cult novels; some consider it the first psychedelic novel and Knapp’s illustrations are highly regarded.
Actually, there have been previous attempts at writing the Art Academy’s history. According to Amanda Parker-Wolery, the school’s marketing director, in 2009 former Academic Dean Diane Smith had students in her Approaches to History class each write a paper on a different 20-year period of school history. They got up to the 1960s when she stopped teaching the course. Also, Rebecca Wright Bilbo did a doctoral dissertation at Indiana University on “Academic or Industrial: Educating the Artist in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati,” which concentrated on the academy’s first years.
“Bilbo’s thesis was great — really in depth, 150 pages,” says Suess, an Enquirer librarian/history columnist whose previous books include Cincinnati Then and Now and Hidden History of Cincinnati. “It gave a really nice foundation. (But) then you get to the next chunk (of the school’s history), and there’s not really much written.”
Fortunately, he says, Cincinnati Art Museum’s Mary R. Schiff Library and Archives has kept its collected information on the academy — from handwritten letters from the Longworth family, critical early benefactors, to school newspapers and old photographs.
“I spent several days going through old stuff — they’re very curated,” Suess says. “And they were very generous in giving us photos. They even scanned in photos that were requested.”
Those archives helped Suess prepare a very colorful book chapter on the academy’s costumed Beaux Arts Balls, which seem to have been established by 1900 and then continued into the 1950s. (After a dormant period, balls returned in 1987 for the school’s centennial.)
In the old days, they had themes such as Mother Goose Ball (1915), Feast of the Little Green God (1924), Alice in Wonderland (1931), Dante’s Inferno (1934) and Adam to Atom (1947).
As Suess writes in the book of the early days: “The balls were known for the grandiose dress and costumes as well as for the behavior that was scandalous for the time. Drinking, smoking and scantily-clad students were shocking yet de rigueur for such events.” They also had surprises — the book recalls how, at the 1932 Reincarnation Ball, “a body in a casket was rolled in and scared the orchestra.”
The Beaux Arts Balls moved around to different sites, including the Art Museum’s Great Hall. “They were legendary,” Suess says.
Using the book as well as other sources, here are thumbnail sketches of just a few of the many notable artists associated with the Art Academy, from the early days to the recent past:
• In the early days, two students — Mary Louise McLaughlin and Maria Longworth Nichols (whose father, Joseph Longworth, funded the McMicken School of Design) — became interested in china painting as a result of taking Benn Pitman’s classes at the school. In 1879, McLaughlin developed an underglaze technique that Longworth used successfully at her Rookwood Pottery. As the book explains, the two women were rivals but also “made Cincinnati ‘the cradle of American art pottery.’ ”
Further, the Art Academy played a key role in Rookwood’s ongoing success. As Nancy E. Owen observed in Rookwood Pottery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Gerald and Virginia Gordon Collection, “The School of Design of the University of Cincinnati, which was transferred to Cincinnati Art Museum in 1884 and renamed Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1887, supported formal training in decorative and industrial arts. Since Rookwood art pottery required the difficult technique of painting underglaze decoration, such training was essential for employment.” Rookwood in 1887 even hired an Art Academy professor to visit once a week and critique or make suggestions to the decorators, she writes.
• While the school’s second leader, Frank Duveneck, has always been one of the city’s best-known and consistently exhibited artists (he was born and raised in Covington), its first one — principal/instructor Thomas Satterwhite Noble — was very accomplished in his own right. But because he did his most notable paintings before moving from New York City to take the job here, he’s comparatively unknown locally.
Born and raised in Lexington, Ky., where his father used “hired” (the book puts quotation marks around the word) slaves on his hemp farm, Noble served in the Confederate Army as a draughtsman, sketching guns during the Civil War. But after the war, he painted four significant anti-slavery paintings so powerful they toured the country. The most famous of these is 1868’s “Margaret Garner,” also known as “The Modern Medea,” which depicted the African-American slave who killed her own daughter rather than see her become a slave, too. Garner then escaped to Cincinnati but was caught. Garner’s life was the basis for Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, as well as for a 2005 opera that was co-commissioned by Cincinnati Opera.
“Duveneck was the Michael Jordan of the school, it’s hard not to think,” Suess says. “Noble’s great work was made before he came here and gets forgotten. But it was a big deal to have someone of his caliber.”
• The stylized, colorful nature and wildlife paintings of the late Charley Harper, who both studied and taught at the Art Academy, have been rediscovered big time by Modernists in recent years, thanks to designer Todd Oldham and Harper’s son Brett championing them to younger generations. You can now find Harper calendars, greeting cards and other material in gift shops coast-to-coast. Oldham and Brett also have made recent strides to get the equally colorful art of Harper’s wife Edie — a student whom he met at the Art Academy on his first day there in 1940 — better known. In 2017, her charming “Crazy Cat, Crazy Quilt” was the model for a new ArtWorks mural on Walnut Street in Over-the-Rhine.
• While the revival of interest in the Harpers’ approach to Modernist art and graphic design has been high-profile, the new interest in the late Jim Flora’s jazzy, playful and colorfully surreal 1940s/1950s record-album illustrations has been more under-the-radar. To some extent, the interest has mirrored the resurgence of vinyl records. There is now a website devoted to him, and three books since 2000 have been devoted to his album-jacket art. Also, three of his children’s books have been recently reprinted. Born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, he attended the Art Academy from 1935-1939, where he met his future wife, Jane Sinnickson.
• Among the recent Art Academy graduates who have found success in the world of Contemporary art is Petah Coyne, who studied printmaking and photography from 1973-1977. She has gone on to be an acclaimed New York-based sculptor, known for her use of such unusual material as taxidermy animals, car parts and hair. She has had shows at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Nashville’s Frist Art Museum and MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass.
“The best thing about the Art Academy, when I attended, was the high level of artistic freedom,” she said in a statement supplied for the book. “As long as you were working, the faculty didn’t bother you, but allowed you to experiment. This, I feel, is most important. Also, most of the teachers at the Academy shared what they were doing artistically with their students: the problems and solutions they found in their own work. The teachers were quite open and giving of their time and energy. Lastly, but probably most importantly, was that for the first time in my life I saw working artists. The teachers were able to support themselves and continue to be prolific with their own work. This was excellent role modeling for me.”
This is an especially good time for a book about the Art Academy’s history, as well as for a sesquicentennial. According to the school’s Parker-Wolery, the school now has a balanced budget and is seeking growth — to 250 or ideally 300 students — through expanding its programs. To that end, it is starting a fundraising campaign to convert unused first-floor space that once housed a brewpub into Future House — a $2.3 million project to create space for new or expanded classes in social-practice art and motion graphics (film/video/animation). Paige Williams, the current vice president for academic affairs/academic dean, says the school initially hopes to create a new minor in social-practice art and major in motion graphics, for which it recently hired a new faculty member. Grote added that the school also is considering building a dormitory.
The Academy’s optimistic, expansive mood reflects a belief that its 2005 move to Over-the-Rhine has now been accepted by prospective students and their parents. That wasn’t always the case. When the move occurred, the area was still recovering from the 2001 civil disturbance prompted by the police shooting of an unarmed black man.
“The first few years were iffy; we had some staff who refused to move downtown with us,” says Kim Krause, a now-retired long-time faculty member who was the school’s fine arts chair from 1997-2012 and academic dean from 2013 to this year.
“We also knew we had to change our mission. We wanted to be a much edgier kind of school. Doing all that at once turned out to be more difficult than we thought.
“We didn’t have a lot of money and we had to get people convinced (the move) was a really good idea. In hindsight, a lot has happened since in that neighborhood,” Krause says. “Our presence was a catalyst that told people, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ ’’
The Art Academy of Cincinnati is located at 1212 Jackson St., Over-the-Rhine. For more info on the school’s anniversary and to order the book, visit artacademy.edu/news-events/150th-anniversary.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 7, 2018.