pp161113 Art Education and Social Capital  

Entrepreneurship in printmaking: Until he was forcibly retired from teaching at the University of Washington School Of Art, this professor championed the entrepreneurial spirit of a handful of students who were willing to explore alternatives to the old art world conventions of that day.

Social Capital as seen in Europe

A paper exploring the role of social capital acquired by students during student and graduate entrepreneurial journeys at three universities in Sweden, England and Spain inspired me to reflect on my work at the University of Washington School Of Art. The paper, published online in April, 2016 titled “The University is Dead: Long live the university,” focused on the connection between social capital and entrepreneurship.

The objective of the research for this paper was to understand how universities can facilitate social capital acquisition in the context of entrepreneurial learning. By “social capital” it is meant networking, for one thing, and the solving of problems through creativity and interchange among mentors and peers.

Awakening

When I reflect on my first months at the UW, I think how being put in an office in the business school—next door to the art building—may have contributed to my teaching and my philosophy of art. In the European research described above, they used a qualitative methodological approach, drawing on what they term the “critical incident technique.”

The “critical incident’ of spending my first twelve weeks in a business building office, with a business professor office mate, may have been a “critical incident” in my formation. Looking out my office window to the art building across the way, may have had the effect distancing me from the citadel of art. It gave me a different perspective on what went on there.

For example, I had a view of the art school’s dumpsters filling with castaway art projects and detritus cast off from attempts at sculpture, drawings galore and worthless paintings. I noticed students struggling to enter the building’s massive, cathedral-style oak door, balancing over-sized portfolios and art toolboxes in one hand and opening the door with the other.

A small parking lot separated the business and art buildings, and there faculty came and went at their convenience. Senior faculty drove sporty cars—a white Jaguar XKE, for example, and the chairman drove a Triumph Spitfire. Lower-ranking faculty drove Volkswagens and older model domestic cars. I drove a six-year old Ford.

Embedded learning

From that distance, from the business school window, I was impressed with what I saw. When I entered the building it was like going from the real world into a church, a holy place with its own reason for being and set apart from the business-like environment I had just left. That experience may have embedded itself and surfaced—years later—as I introduced business and entrepreneurship methods to my students.

As an educator (and less so than as an artist) I was motivated to blend business and entrepreneurship activities within my curriculum to facilitate learning, the kind of learning that would lead to my students’ successes in the world beyond the walls of the art school.

Not only was it the chance incident of my brief business building residency, it was also due to my particular field—printmaking. While printmaking regarded as “fine art” it’s inextricably tied to business and industry. Printmaking is the ancestor of all technologies that shaped the world as we know it.

Therefore, to help my students succeed in printmaking, I got them to think about business and industrial practices on which publishing depends. It was not a trade school, and most of them would succeed in other art forms—not only printmaking. My curriculum balanced liberal arts and engineering, business ethics, and social networking in a skunkworks outside mainstream publishing and the arts.

Is the UW Art School Dead?

At the end of the article cited above, the conclusion is, “. . . the university is dead (as was traditionally understood); long live the (entrepreneurial) university.” This sentence expresses perfectly my view of the University of Washington School Of Art today—by comparison to my days and students in my classes in the 1970s, the UW Art School is probably dead. Yet, in my heart and mind, the entrepreneurial university that I knew is alive—somewhere and sometimes.