State of the Arts - Past and Present

When John O’Neil was being recruited in 1965 to chair Rice’s new Department of Fine Arts, he was unimpressed with what he found on campus. In his personal notes about the creation of the department, which chronicle a five-year period and appear in full below, O’Neil comments that, “Interest on campus in the establishment of the Department of Fine Arts seemed unenthusiastic. Some older faculty members actually were hostile.”

“I returned to Oklahoma,” writes O’Neil, a renowned painter who, at the time, was director of the School of Art at the University of Oklahoma, “realizing that even though Rice enjoyed a fine reputation in science and engineering, any distinction in art would be hard won.”

How things have changed since then. The original Department of Fine Arts morphed into the Department of Art and Art History, which in 2003 split into two—the Department of Art History and the Department of Visual Arts. Today, they are important components of the humanities at Rice. And as the departments celebrate their 40th anniversary on campus, their chairs find much more enthusiasm for the arts here than their predecessor O’Neil did decades ago.

Karin Broker, chair of the Department of Visual Arts, is especially pleased about one of the biggest proponents of the humanities at Rice: President David W. Leebron. She was bowled over by Leebron’s advice in his matriculation address to the Class of 2008: “Take an art class, even though anything not expressed in numbers starts to give you hives.”

With support from the president and the dean of the School of Humanities, Gary Wihl, Broker forged a new collaboration with the Glassell School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Core Program will bring recent master’s of fine arts graduates from the Glassell School to Rice as adjunct lecturers. Rice students will receive instruction from the “cream of the crop” in the arts world, and the new graduates will get a taste of the academic environment. Broker hopes that, in the future, a component will be added to the program wherein Rice students can take courses at the Glassell School in such areas as ceramics, foundry, and jewelry making, which Rice currently does not have the resources to offer.

Visual arts is not just for students who want to pursue careers as artists, Broker explains. In fact, she considers the arts a vital educational component. Through the arts, she says, “We can develop the Renaissance student—we can take students with the math and the chemistry background and make them great.”

Art history, meanwhile, also is blossoming since becoming its own department. “Art history is a major intellectual discipline in the humanities and is important for its role in academia, the museum world, and publishing,” explains Joseph Manca, chair of the department. “We have our own major and honors program, we do our own hiring and promotion of faculty, and we control our own budget.”

The department has moved into the renovated Herring Hall, formerly home to Rice’s business school. It includes the state-of-the-art Visual Resource Center, a collection of 300,000 images of works of art and visual culture from prehistoric to contemporary times.

Studio art and art history are very different disciplines, Manca points out, and ideally never should have been joined together, but having two separate departments wasn’t practical 40 years ago. O’Neil, who died in 2004, had a great vision for both the visual arts and art history at Rice, and Broker—his officemate for many years—is confident that the state of the arts at Rice today is what he was working toward.

—Dana Benson