By pure chance, I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of abstract artist Frank Piatek’s last critiques. He led the end-of-semester critique for my fellow Painting and Drawing post-bacc student, Hanying Xu, who creates massive yet delicate, other-worldly oil paintings. I had lent her a hand hanging her canvases and stuck around for the crit. Frank’s interaction with Hanying was beautiful to watch; they seemed to completely understand one another.
Frank was famously a scholar of spirituality as well as an accomplished artist. It was a pleasure to watch him carefully explore a student’s work while serving as a kind of conductor for the rest of the panel. The discussion focused on creation, in both its practical and conceptual aspects. It was a refreshing departure from the trial by fire that critiques can slide into.
Frank Piatek died in January. There is now one less advocate for prioritizing the spiritual at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is missed by many.
Hanying is driven by a deeply spiritual practice; her work could be described as capturing the movement of the soul. It was an ideal setting for all of Frank’s strengths, as he could speak with equal facility and insight to both the materials and techniques Hanying employs and the ineffable qualities of her subject matter. He seemed to immediately grasp Hanying’s sometimes esoteric explanations of her process and her choices. They were very much in sync.
Artists like Frank and Hanying talk about and deal in the very soul of art, the living presence that animates our work beyond our own consciousness as artists. Anyone who sees Wassily Kandinsky’s “Blue” and doesn’t feel its presence is simply not getting the point of making art. What we make, when we pour ourselves into the work, can be as alive as we are. That is what I mean by the soul of art.
Institutions may not literally have a soul, but I do think collections of people have a spiritually collective existence that is greater — or at least different — than our individual existences. We are more when we are together, nurturing a community. This is what I mean by the soul of SAIC, and I worry that it has been lost in all the “getting and spending.”
That crit was a huge relief to me and a reassurance that somewhere at SAIC, there were instructors who were still concerned about pure artmaking. In the first half of the year, the SAIC community was flooded with emails from the school about limits, scarcity, security, property, rules, and what we cannot do. There are great instructors here, don’t get me wrong, and many do talk about these things — but I worry about the dearth of such topics in the communication coming from the administration, which is most of our institutional engagement as a student body.
The school, it seems, on most days, is about business — minimizing legal liability and maximizing dollars and cents — and little else. The true business of the school must be the nurturing of the creative lives of the people who pay substantial sums and invest significant numbers of years to attend SAIC. To the extent that there is a kind of spiritual mission at the school, it ought to be this: a sense of stewardship of the young artists who choose to dwell here for a while.
An institution that is meant to shape the creative process ought to be thoughtful about the kind of culture it propagates and supports. I don’t think that’s controversial, but I also don’t think it fits very comfortably into the bottom-line era we are experiencing here. We hear a lot of talk about the business of the school and how employable students are, about cost-cutting measures, and how we have to both give more and ask for less. It would be nice to also see tangible proof of concern about our well-being.
No quick fix will transform SAIC into a more nurturing, caring environment. I will continue to think about it and write about it here, because I want to talk to you about the ideas other people have on this topic, and to hear yours. We must care for one another, these days more than ever. And to do that, we must first recognize that we, as artists, partake of the spiritual. In a bleak world with endless war and starvation, I stand with protecting our artists, the improbable spirits that spark joy into this sometimes gray world when we need it most.
