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Why did the art program cross the road?
Students constantly complain about the conditions of their classrooms—too hot, too small, too dark, too loud—yet few complain as emphatically as Yale art students. Professor Richard Benson, Dean of the Yale School of Art, has heard innumerable complaints in the past four years, especially regarding his school's former placement in the Art and Architecture (A&A) Building. "The [old] Rudolph building was difficult," he said. "It was pretty hard to work there. It's great for architecture, but not made for artists." He acknowledged that students enrolled in introductory courses had to do their work in the basement, where there was no source of natural light and only makeshift studio spaces. A new building, he said, was long overdue. As art students return this year to a new locale, it seems their time has come.
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The School of Art no longer shares its space with the School of Architecture. Instead, one of the A's in A&A has crossed Chapel Street and has settled in the old New Haven Jewish Community Center (JCC). Both graduate and undergraduate students of the visual arts have already started attending classes in the newly renovated building, the Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Hall, which includes two floors of galleries, studios, classrooms, and even an experimental theater for the Drama School. Graduate students will also benefit from a newly constructed building behind Green Hall, which provides 45 painting studios surrounding a "painting pit," where students have painting critiques.
The grass is always greener...
Graduate students are not the only ones to benefit from the new space, however. Most of the introductory art courses that once met in the basement of the A&A building now meet in the basement of Green Hall, in a room that has natural light coming from a panel of windows and an extensive workspace. Emily Eidener, ES '03, who took Introduction to Drawing last year, described the old facilities as "claustrophobic." She recalled that a couple of students fainted at the beginning of last year due to the heat.
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The basement of Green Hall is also home to the new undergraduate photography facility, one that has similarly remedied former problems, including a severe shortage of machines to develop color prints and a leak in the basement of the older A&A facility that damaged some photographs last year. Benson emphasized that the new undergraduate photography facilities "improved more than the graduate [facilities]" since undergraduate students now have access to private darkrooms as well as the color printing machines. Moreover, students in the painting classes have seen immediate benefits—they each received a private rolling storage cabinet at the beginning of the semester. No longer will students have to struggle to keep their work and supplies safe.
...on the other side
Student reaction has not been universally positive, however. Fluorescent lights, notorious for their tendency to distort true color, illuminate the hallways and many of the classrooms of the new building. Benson maintained that the lights are necessary. "It's always difficult, but they provide illumination," he said. Perhaps more cutting is the complaint coming from students in the painting program, many of whom are worried about losing the amount of workspace they had in previous years. "My studio space is minuscule, less than half the space of anything I have had in the last three years," art major Nora Ericson, BR '01, said. "It will completely change the work I'm able to do." Benson hesitated to agree with the criticism, explaining that the former wealth of space had always been just "temporary," and that the school has actually expanded its permanent art space with the new building. Regardless, Ericson noted that in her senior year, she will neither be able to paint "large paintings or even step back from my work" in a shared cubicle.
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Furthermore, the new building does not accomodate the entire art program. Sculpture classes still meet at Hammond Hall up Science Hill, as Green Hall could not provide enough space to accommodate them. "Ideally the school would have been together in one building," sculpture professor Jessica Stockholder admitted. "But Hammond Hall is a great building for sculpture." Yet some students disagree. "The Hammond Hall facilities have all of the machines they need," Eidener noted, "but the building is so run down." Moreover, many students complain that the distant locale makes transportation of materials difficult. Benson acknowledges that the mile-long walk necessitates that sculpture be relocated at some point in the future, but predicts that the University will not be able to undertake such a project for another six to eight years.
An artistic vision
Despite the mixed response of the artistic community, the building's renovation provides an architectural improvement for the campus as a whole. "Yale had its eye on it for a long time," Benson said. "Nice high ceilings, big working spaces, but a run-down building." In renovating the Hall, which was originally designed by Louis Kahn in 1951, the architectural team focused on preserving much of the feel of the former JCC; a plaque in the entryway dedicates the building to all Jewish members of the community who died for their country. In the graduate photography critique room, located in an old swimming pool, architect Deborah Burke left the old green tiling on a wall to hint at bygone cannonballs and belly-flops. Burke also converted an old gym, complete with basketball hoops, into the new graphic design area.
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The renovation of Green Hall also marks an major move for the Arts Area Advisory Committee (AAAC). Diana Kleiner, chair of the committee and Deputy Provost for the Arts, described the general purpose of the AAAC as "the keeper of the vision for the arts at Yale." The committee has undertaken a massive plan to reorganize Yale's art facilities that includes an expansion of the art gallery and the renovation of the A&A building. Over the summer, the committee conducted an "interim renovation" of the A&A building, and started partial renovations on the Kahn and Swartwout Buildings. Kleiner explained that the timing for these projects is, as always, dependent on fundraising. Given the art school's current financial prospects, Green Hall promises to mark the beginning of an extensive improvement of the facilities for arts at Yale, and leads artists to wonder whether people will start calling the A&A building the "A Building" in years to come.
All materials © 2000 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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