“I don’t know. I guess I’ll just keep it up.” “Funny, I always assumed you’d be heading off to grad school sometime soon, but I guess not.”

He tapped away at his phone and answered absentmindedly, “Yeah, but I don’t know what grad school has to offer me. What would I learn there that I can’t learn on my own? I still have debt from undergrad, and I don’t want to kill the momentum I have going professionally.”

“Oh, I agree completely, whatever you want to do from here on you can do on your own. It’s just that you always seemed like a natural teacher. I assumed you would want to teach at some point”

That got his attention. He looked up from his phone with a start, “Of course I want to teach. That’s always been part of my plan.”

“Well you can’t get a teaching job without an MFA.”

“Won’t my professional experience and my exhibitions count? After all, you don’t have an MFA do you?”

“It’s true, I don’t have an MFA but that’s always been my dirty little secret. When I started teaching it wasn’t imperative. If you want to teach now then you absolutely need to have a terminal degree.”

And therein lies the problem. The general wisdom among my colleagues is that going to graduate school straight from your BFA is seldom a good idea. On the other hand, if you wait a few years, and you have been actively pursuing your photography, then chances are you have already started to build a career and you don’t want to interrupt it with more academia (and accumulate more debt).

When Should You Apply to Graduate School?

If you are applying to graduate school because you want a few more years to “find yourself,” or because you are looking at a career in teaching as a fallback position, you are applying for all the wrong reasons, and the chances are the selection committee will sense this in both your application and your portfolio.

Applying to grad school should be a decision based on your aspirations as a mature artist, and there are very few 21-year-old art students who can really be classed as mature artists. Most graduate programs want to see that you have already demonstrated yourself as a committed artist capable of working independently of the structure of an academic environment.

Anecdotally, I can say that I can’t remember any student that I’ve personally recommended who was accepted on any MFA program when they applied straight out of college, no matter how strong their portfolio or recommendations. On the occasions when I have heard of students being accepted to graduate programs straight out of college it has usually been when they applied to a grad school in a different discipline or area of focus.

Which Graduate Program Is Right for You?

This is just my personal opinion, but I think that your graduate school decision should be influenced by your undergraduate experience. Let’s start by taking a look at the pros and cons of three different undergraduate educations:

Liberal Arts/General Studies

In the past a liberal arts degree in itself qualified you as an educated person, but a traditional liberal arts program in its contemporary form is really not designed to be a terminal degree. While not every student with a BA goes on to graduate school, many employers will expect a specialized post-graduate degree, MBA, MFA, or MSW, etc.

This means that the aspiring photographer who has completed a liberal arts BA (with a few photography classes) may lack the critical rigor and specialized technical training to launch a career without further education within a photo-based graduate program. However, it also means that you may not have enough training or a strong enough portfolio to be admitted to one of the top programs.

But don’t be discouraged. There are plenty of liberal arts/general studies students who have gotten into top grad schools. It’s not impossible, it just means that you will have to apply yourself to building a strong portfolio. There are also MFA programs, like the School of Visual Arts, that offer three-year programs to help fill in the technical skills and art-history components that you might have missed during your undergraduate training.

An Arts Program within a Liberal Arts University

This is the model for our Photography and Imaging Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Our students complete half their credits within their photo major (photography, multimedia, and critical studies), and half their credits within a traditional liberal arts education (literature, science, history, economics, etc.). The same would be true for a student pursuing a different area of specialization like dance or filmmaking.

A large percentage of our students pursue a minor or double major in a liberal arts course of study in addition to their photographic education. However, the opportunities for our students to study painting, drawing, or other traditional fine arts are limited.

Arts Schools

The foundation programs for most arts academies (Cooper Union, Maryland Institute College of Art, Chicago Art Institute, etc.) are based on a modernized Bauhaus model. The foundation program typically consists of basic training across all the visual arts for the first two years: drawing, painting, graphic design, multimedia, sculpture, etc., with the student spending their junior and senior years focusing on a particular area of interest. The advantage of the art-school education is that you are free to move across disciplines and you are in a community of artists who are working in variety of media. The result is that students from art academies usually graduate with a very deep knowledge of the arts, and very strong critical skills, but often have less exposure to general studies subjects.

In the past, a BFA from one of the top art schools qualified you as an expert in your area of specializations (photography, illustration, design, etc.). However, these are professions that haven’t historically required advanced degrees.

All of these pedagogical models have their strengths, but they all have obvious weaknesses as well. The student from a liberal arts program might have a lot to express, but lack the technical skills to execute his/her vision, and lack the critical vocabulary to discuss their work, or formulate a consistent aesthetic. The art-school graduate has a deep knowledge of art and probably possesses formidable skills in execution across different mediums, but may lack the rounded education and world-view of the liberal arts student. The photo/art student within a liberal arts university lacks exposure to other art forms and media, which could open up a greater range of appropriate visual solutions based on the ideas the artist wishes to express. For me, the first question any artist should ask when applying for an MFA program is often linked to what elements were missing from their undergraduate program.

Master’s programs are highly individual, and very distinct from each other. In a typical undergraduate photo program there are well over 150 students, so the faculty and curriculum has to accommodate a wide variety of interests, points of view, and creative ambitions.

In contrast, the typical MFA program might have as few as ten students in total. In a photo-driven program they might all be photographers, but in many of the multi-disciplinary programs there might only be two photographers and the other students may be painters, sculptors, videographers, or performance artists.

The faculty/curriculum of an MFA program is also likely to be geared to a distinct aesthetic or point of view. What this all means is that you should choose your graduate options wisely, and in accordance with your long-term creative aspirations or you are likely to find yourself a square peg in a program comprising round holes. Far too many students apply to certain prestige programs simply for the status of the degree from a big name institution without thoroughly investigating the program or questioning whether it is appropriate to their work. While it’s true that an MFA from a blue-chip university might open a few doors, those doors can also close behind you quickly if your work isn’t up to snuff.

Low-residency programs like the Hartford Art School’s MFA program are a relatively new and terrific alternative for people like my assistant who want to continue their commercial career while still pursuing an MFA. In a low-residency program you are typically only on site for two (very intense) weeks a year during the summer with an additional two weeks’ residency in other cities. For the remainder of the year students are expected to work towards their thesis with their advisors via electronic communication.

Graduate school is a significant investment; it pays to do your due diligence. Talk to alumni, and try to attend a critique if at all possible.

When you are looking at graduate schools you are—more than anything—looking for a mentor. Look carefully at the faculty and be sure to ascertain that you will have access to the people you most want to study with. Because graduate faculty are often hired for their “marquee” value as artists it’s not uncommon for them to be relatively unavailable to students compared with your past experiences with undergraduate faculty. You don’t want to gain admission to the program of your dreams only to discover that the artist you had hoped to study with is on sabbatical.

Portfolio

If you are applying for an MFA program then you should already know how to put together a strong portfolio. That said, I know that my colleagues and I are always happy to look at the recent work of any ex-student. When you go back to your undergraduate professors for recommendations be sure to include all of your support materials and ask them for their advice on your portfolio.

It can’t be stressed enough that your portfolio should have a strong selection of recent work. However, it is equally important to demonstrate a long-term commitment to your work and artistic growth so your portfolio should include some of your older undergraduate work as well (assuming it is still recent enough to be relevant).

Most schools will require you to submit your portfolio electronically prior to a personal interview. Bear in mind that electronic presentation tends to level the playing field for all the applicants. The perceived quality between a photograph shot on a cell phone and another shot on an 8 × 10 camera can be fairly insignificant on a computer screen, but when they are viewed as finished prints the differences are huge. Make sure to document any relevant technical information in your electronic application.

Fine printing (even digitally) is an acquired skill that is also perishable if you don’t practice it regularly. If you haven’t actually printed your work in a few years (very possible in our age of digital imaging) then both your technical and critical skills have probably deteriorated. Be sure to print your portfolio before you submit your application in order to ensure that the images you are submitting will look as good in print form as they do online. Don’t wait until a week before your interview to print your portfolio. Give yourself the time to make the best prints you can, wait a week or two, and then reevaluate and reprint as needed. The people you will be interviewing with are some of the best artists in the world and your goal is to impress them.

Essays and Interviews

Of course your essays should be letter perfect (don’t rely on spell check!), articulate, and fully formed, but you should also remember that your goal isn’t merely to get into graduate school, it is to get into the right graduate school.

Looking at the review process for undergraduate students might help to illustrate the point:

When we review the portfolios for the undergraduate program at NYU we aren’t simply looking for the best photographers. We are actively building a creative community.

This means that when we are choosing the incoming class of 35–50 freshmen/transfers students out of 500+ applicants we are looking for qualities that go beyond their photographic abilities. In fact, we actually go out of our way to accept some students who might not have the strongest portfolio (perhaps their high school didn’t offer any arts curriculum) but whose work shows a motivation and/or commitment beyond their skills or education. They might write an essay that demonstrates a unique insight or sense of humor, or they might have an interest in a humanitarian cause that they feel photography can serve. We don’t just want good photographers, we want original thinkers; students who will contribute to the creative process of the community and actively participate in the success of their peers as well as their own.

One of my personal criteria when I’m evaluating our applicants is a sense of mission. This is a difficult field to succeed in, and photographers who don’t have the burning need to be photographers will find it very hard indeed.

I stress these points because in my conversations with colleagues who teach in graduate programs this seems to be the same criteria that they apply but at a far higher level of refinement. Graduate departments are typically very small, so your critical skills and contributions (or lack thereof) will have a more noticeable impact on the greater community. You will also (hopefully) be working with your professors/advisors on a much more intimate level than you are used to so it is in their interest to be extremely selective about which candidates are worthy of their time and energies.

Are you open to new ideas? Are you willing to be honest with your peers during critique? These are some of the questions that the people reviewing your application are likely to be considering that go beyond the quality of your portfolio, and different programs will be evaluating your applications through the unique filter of their particular educational model. Among the elite schools different criteria will apply; a photography-driven program like Yale or Hartford will probably be looking for different candidates than an interdisciplinary program like UCLA or Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.

You are applying to graduate school as a mature adult. Your essays should be an accurate reflection of your creative goals and aspirations. Don’t try to second-guess what they are looking for just to get accepted; be honest and let the chips fall where they may.

Interviews and On-site Visits

If you make it through the first round of applications you will probably be invited to come for a personal interview. This is really the most critical and important part of the application process. If your finances and schedule allow you should make it a priority to visit the school, see it first hand, and attend a critique. This is one of the most significant financial investments you will make in your life. You wouldn’t buy a used car without a test drive would you?

Bear in mind that they aren’t just interviewing you. You are interviewing them as well. Virtually every grad school student I have ever talked to has changed their mind and decided against one of their top choices based on their experience during their interview, or after attending a critique.

Paying for It All

There are no easy answers on how to pay for grad school but there are some useful strategies:

•  Many of the elite programs like U.C.L.A. in California and Hunter College in New York City, are state institutions. By establishing local residency early you can qualify for resident tuition (far lower than full tuition paid by non-residents). Make sure to document your residency status as soon as possible by getting a local driver’s license, changing your address, and/or setting up a local utility (gas/electric) account.

•  If you are accepted to a state university and you are an out-of-state resident it might be worthwhile to defer acceptance until you can establish residency.

•  Some of the top private universities like Yale and Columbia have endowment programs to help with tuition.

•  Many schools like California College of Arts offer teaching fellowships that will allow you to defray your tuition by teaching in the undergraduate program. This has the added benefit of giving you teaching experience, an important consideration if you plan to apply for teaching jobs later on.

•  Finally, remember that everything in life is negotiable. If you have been accepted to several programs and offered a full scholarship by one of your lesser choices, it’s worth it to see if you can leverage that promise in order to get a better financial aid package with one of your top choices.

What Do You Get for the Money?

In a nutshell:

•  the time and facilities to develop your creative vision;

•  a community of artists who will challenge and support you;

•  exposure to ideas about art theory that will make you think differently about yourself and your work.

I’ve contacted a group of my alumni separately who have all completed their MFA at different universities around the country and assembled their thoughts and experiences into a fictional round-table discussion.

Case Study

LISA FAIRSTEIN

www.lisafairstein.com/

MFA, School of Visual Arts, NYC

Interview

MJ: So I was particularly interested in your take on graduate school because you graduated from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and not the NYU photo program. Then you chose a photography-based graduate program.

But more than that; you worked for me for a little while right after school, and then you went on to work as an assistant for many years to some of the top commercial photographers in the field, people like Martin Schoeller and Oberto Gili, and many others. You got your MFA in 2012, but you got your BA in 1998. That’s a pretty long break from academia.

What I’m getting at is that you were older and had a whole overview of the commercial photography world at a very high level before grad school. What did you hope to get from the experience?

LF: The influence of a lot of smart people, time to think, and the focus to change the way I had been working with photography.

It’s true. I had the skills and resources to launch a commercial career, but as time went on and the industry changed dramatically, I found that I just wasn’t interested in that career anymore. I enjoyed many of the elements of the commercial work, like the technical and physical challenges, and was attracted to the lifestyle surrounding commercial work, especially the exposure you get to such a variety of people and places. But the nature of the industry changes brought a lot of stuff that I found undesirable. And I decided to pursue a different lifestyle and engage a different way of thinking.

I had always wanted to focus on my fine art and there’s a dialogue around fine art that is different, in fact, doesn’t exist in the commercial world.

And while it’s true that I graduated from Gallatin, I did take at least four photo-based critical studies classes at Tisch, a lot of studio classes, and I was an Art History minor. I had a pretty extensive art education that had a broad base. I just didn’t graduate with a BFA.

But photography was different then, and fine-art photography in particular was very different then. There are so many different ways of working now. Back then it was so much more about pure photography in the traditional documentary, medium-specific way that we thought of it. You know the tradition; Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, and back then that was the kind of image making that interested me as well.

But it was 14 years between graduating from college and getting my MFA. Photography and I had both changed a lot in that time.

I think we’ve had to redefine photographic image-making. Not only photographs, but photographic activity as a whole has lost its traditional context. The line drawn around what makes a photograph, or a photographer, or photographic expression, is arbitrary. So I think photography has had the possibility to grow, beyond pre-defined criteria, and artists working with photography have grown with it. Work that interests me, that engages photographic concerns in a variety of expressions, keeps coming along. And that will continue. And perhaps such lines delineating what is photographic will continue to be less defined, and the discussion surrounding photography will keep shifting accordingly.

And in terms of the ways I had changed personally over that time … I had gained the kind of work ethic that you learn from hard work and paying bills, and I gained the decision-making skills to figure out what I wanted. So when I went into grad school I didn’t waste any time. I took advantage of every second that I was there.

Confetti Sculpted Decorative Multitude, 2012 (From the series Ultra-Static)

Lisa Fairstein

MJ: So though the MFA program at SVA is still photo based, at SVA you felt that it’s based in a different tradition than your undergrad experience?

LF: Yes, I’ll say that the program I went through at SVA is open both to tradition and experimentation. It’s a big program, somewhere around 50–70 students I’d estimate. There are good and bad points to a program that big. One of the good things is that they are so open to so many points of view. And the inclusion of a moving-image track is one of the more notable features of the program.

MJ: That’s a really big program. I had no idea.

LF: It is. Part of why it’s so big is because, depending on your prior experience, it can be either a two or three-year program. If you’re a student from a strict liberal arts background with no photo or video training, or art-history education, you can go through the MFA program in three years and make up the missing elements of technique and art history.

With a program that size, they also have the facilities to bring in a lot of great people, and the Department Chair, Charles Traub, does an excellent job of bringing in such great people. He brings in faculty who are from a variety of disciplines, aesthetics, and points of view. It’s a range from traditional photographers and moving-image artists, to purely conceptual artists, along with other theoreticians who work with photography and video. This is demonstrated in the department’s official title of “MFA Photography, Video and Related Media.” Having so many options is part of what is great, as long as you know who you want to study with and what you want to do. But some students can get a little lost in the multitude of choices.

And along those lines … another bad thing about such a large department … to put it bluntly … with so many students, maybe some of them shouldn’t be there. They just aren’t mature enough or motivated enough, and get accepted just to fill the slots. I’m sure you’ve felt that in some of your undergrad classes.

MJ: Absolutely, but that’s undergrad …

LF: Exactly, it’s more natural for some younger students to be less than committed, but once you get to a grad program everyone should be dedicated and focused on their work.

MJ: Do you feel that was a problem for you?

LF: It was. I think you learn as much, if not more, from you peers. But there will be some of that in any program, and you will need to advocate for yourself. If you’re not getting what you need, be resourceful and seek it out. I was there to do what I needed to do and I was diligent about putting together a program with advisors and classmates that worked well for me.

Another drawback of such a large program is there are only so many instructors who can work with so many students, so if you missed the signup you could lose the chance to work with the instructors who were in line with your interests and practice. I’d get there on the day of registration at 5 a.m. so I could get exactly the classes and instructors I wanted.

But back to the strengths of the program, I’ll say that all the instructors I had were really engaged, and I had a few that went above and beyond. Penelope Umbrico in particular is a very dedicated artist and instructor. She ended up becoming my thesis advisor, and really helped me develop my work.

MJ: Another thing that’s also a little unusual about you is that you don’t seem like you’re very interested in teaching, which is usually one of the primary reasons people go to grad school.

LF: Hmmm, yes and no. I have no interest in teaching full time. I’m not good with institutional bureaucracy.

MJ: I know what you’re talking about. When I became full-time at NYU it was a bit of a culture shock. I had been freelancing for so long and been my own boss. I had a little trouble adjusting to the culture of an institution and the bureaucracy, even though I had been an adjunct in the department for so long.

LF: Exactly. I’m a freelance worker, that’s my mentality, but I would love to teach as an adjunct as a way of continuing an engagement with ideas and conversations about things that interest me.

I’m actually proposing a new course on contemporary photography. I feel like so many photo-history programs stop at the eighties. When I was in school we were hungry for a class that had a more current perspective. And in terms of the benefits of teaching, I think just putting together the curriculum for this class was a great thing for me to do. It helped my thinking so much … I’m happy to make my living doing commercial photography. Teaching would be more for the intellectual engagement it offers.

MJ: That’s a really smart idea. I think that’s the kind of thinking that comes from all the years you spent in the commercial world. Proposing a class you want to teach is much more proactive way of going about it.

LF: Sure. The simple fact of being present, even for a continuing education class—people see you, they know you, then when they need someone to teach another class, you’re the person who comes to mind.

MJ: One thing I just thought of: Because you were out of school for a long time, was it hard for you to put together a portfolio? Or maybe a better way to say it is, did the pressure of putting together a portfolio kind of motivate you to work?

LF: I had been working all along on personal projects, but I also knew I wasn’t happy with what I had been producing. I went to grad school to figure out what kinds of pictures I really wanted to make.

I was, and I still am, interested in lens-based images, but I was looking for a new way to pursue that for myself.

When you asked me to talk to you about my experience in grad school, I thought a lot about what I wanted to say and what we might talk about and what motivated me to go back to school. It’s difficult to distill to just a few points because there are so many things to consider, so many moving parts. You really have to research the programs you are interested in. And all MFA programs are different—you have to look at who is actively teaching in a program, what the overall philosophy is, and anyone interested should really insist on sitting in on some classes to get a sense of the tone. And then you have to be accepted. After these initial considerations, as I said before, and especially related to studying in a larger program, being active in deciding the course of your studies and advocating for yourself is really important. And throughout all of this, both the initial and final decision usually is, can I afford this? The cost of an art education and the debt loads people are forced to carry are absurd, and should be a very real consideration. I will say though that if people can’t afford private programs, they should consider good state schools, or universities with endowments. And then they should work really hard on a portfolio, apply, and, if they have to, apply again.

Pillow Porn, 2012 (From the series Ultra-Static)

Lisa Fairstein

Case Study

NAT WARD

www.natwardphoto.com/

MFA, Colombia University, NYC

Interview

MJ: What are you doing now?

NW: I am working as a product photographer on staff at Macy’s. I’m with the e-commerce division, so I do soft goods for http://Macys.com.

MJ: I wanted to talk to you because you went to an East Coast graduate school and almost everyone I’ve spoken to went to California; the other thing is that you went to a photo-based grad school opposed to a multidisciplinary grad school

NW: Actually, you are mistaken there. The program at Columbia is interdisciplinary; there are only four photo students a year within a large graduate program of 26 split between sculpture, painting, print-making, etc. Our critiques are with everyone too.

MJ: Oh really? In that case what do you think you got out of it that you didn’t get out of your time at NYU?

NW: What I think I got was two of the best years I’ve ever had in terms of critical thinking, and in terms of stewing … on making work. I also got teaching experience, and it was a true privilege to be able to do that.

I chose Columbia for a number of reasons; I wanted to stay in New York where I had already invested a lot of time and effort into developing a network and I wanted to expand that network. I knew that part of what comes with graduate school is that you’re buying into a network.

I got the chance to really concentrate on my work. Between undergrad and grad school I had a solo show in New York, and I’d also developed the beginnings of a curatorial kind of career. Things were going really well.

Then I got nominated to go down to the Look3 Festival in 2010 and I thought, this is great, but what I saw there was a strong focus on photography in journalism, editorial, and corporate partnership work without a robust or rigorous discussion of photography in the larger art-world context of galleries and museums, where admittedly photography often gets short-shrift anyway. I wanted to engage in discussions of photography and art with painters and sculptors. Artists I thought we were dealing with relatable challenges, concerns, and desires. I wanted to be in critiques with artists in other disciplines. I wanted to take those critical theory classes with sculptors and painters while bringing my perspective as a photographer.

Zeno at Delphi (quotation from “he knew his days were numbers”) Four Photographs 54 × 50 inches 2013. Installation View: Come together: Surviving Sandy, Curated by Phong Bui, Brooklyn, NY 2013–2014

MJ: What do you think those discussions did for you?

NW: I think that they helped me develop a vocabulary, or at least become more fluent in a critical vocabulary that I was able to develop. It’s different for me than for other photographers in other programs because I had studied painting at RISD before I went to Tisch Photo. I also did a cultural anthropology minor at NYU which was super-heavy in critical theory, so I had all of these things floating around.

I had also spent a few years doing professional architectural photography and shooting my own work which gave me a whole other set of ideas and vocabulary. I wanted a place where I could bring all of those things together. I wanted a community of people who were interested in those ideas and in providing critical insight into each other’s practices.

I wanted to be in New York. I wanted to develop a network of peers because I felt very much like I was living in a vacuum after undergrad in terms of making my own work and I wanted to stop working in that vacuum.

And the third thing that happened was I had the chance to meet and work with Joel Meyerowitz on a few occasions.

MJ: How did you meet Joel? You know he was one of my teachers, right?

NW: Yes, I do. I met Joel through my mother, who is the director of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, and he had donated some of his prints from the “Aftermath” project to the museum.

Joel insisted I meet Thomas Roma who directs in the photo program at Columbia. I knew in the first meeting that I wanted to spend two years working with this guy! I think that’s the thing a lot of people either don’t realize about grad school when they apply or realize within the first couple of weeks: you have to go to grad school to be with the people that you want to be around and the mentors that you really want to work with.

Tom has a particular view of photography, very close to the way John Szarkowski thought about photography, that was in line with my thinking. Photography takes all of the real stuff of the world and turns it into a new thing, it doesn’t trump it up.

You can have an experience with a photograph, you can stare at it impolitely, it can be like a country song, it can be absolutely, knock-you-in-the-gut, devastating. And that is the thing about allegorical content, it has the potential to be extraordinary no matter what.

I absolutely went to Columbia for Tom Roma, and it also happened to be the kind of program I wanted to be a part of. I also applied to the UCLA, CCA, and USC inter-disciplinary programs, but I found my mentor at Columbia before I even applied; it was my top choice.

I had applied to Yale two years before, almost as a knee-jerk reaction, but after my interview there I think I realized that I was applying there because “it was the thing to do” and not because it was the right program for me. Columbia was exactly the right place.

MJ: What do you hope to get from your MFA?

NW: I think I have gotten so far what I’m going to get from it. I paid for those two years and that’s what I got. I paid for a great network and some of my closest friends, peers, and colleagues are from the program at Columbia. I think that it has provided me with opportunities that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I had a really great year showing my work through 2013 and 2014. And … there is no reason to be coy about it; when people see you have an MFA from Columbia, or Hunter or Yale, UCLA, USC, CCA, or any of those elite programs they tend to take you seriously. There is a prejudice in favor of those programs and I’ve seen that, and it happens. I’m not gonna lie, it’s a great byproduct.

Photography at Columbia is a different thing, in that the focus is really on teaching. I would like to teach, that’s a goal for me. I almost took a job at UNC and getting a teaching job would be easier if I were willing to relocate. It might be foolish for me to stay in New York at this point in time, but my career contacts are here for the career I want to have.

I’m currently working at Macy’s and I’m keeping my ear to the ground for a teaching job. I taught at ICP and I taught at Columbia. I love teaching, and it’s not the old cliché of it energizing your practice. It’s that it keeps you honest, I think that’s the most important thing. It’s the thing that you go into the classroom, and you look at these kids in the face, and you teach them about this thing that you supposedly know the most about. If you’re not doing what you say they have to do, then why are you in front of them?

This is the most important thing that I got out of my time in grad school; it finally sunk in for me. Photography rewards hard work.

You know, I just got back from two weeks down in Florida where I changed film 4 × 5 holders for an hour in a room with a heroin addict pacing, scratching, and telling me how short on money he is right now. Would I have ever put myself in that position before grad school? No way! I was too interested in my own comfort.

I remember being 16, making photographs, and saying wow, “This is so easy for me.” But that is the opposite of how I think about photography now. There are people that go to photography school because they don’t want to work that hard. I think when you’re trying to make art out of photography, that is a crippling attitude to have.

The Champ, Two Photographs 24 × 30 inches 2013

Nat Ward

Case Study

RIAN DUNDON

http://riandundon.com/

MA Social Documentation, University of California Santa Cruz

From Changsha, a document of modern China by Rian Dundon

Rian Dundon

Interview

MJ: What have you been up to? When, why, and where did you decide to go back to graduate school?

RD: I started in 2010 with a two-year program at University of California, Santa Cruz; it was an MA program. I’ve been done for two years now.

The program at UC Santa Cruz, was pretty neat. I had also been looking at the journalism school in Berkeley. My main thing was I wanted to do it locally here in California at a state college to get the public tuition. I didn’t want to go into debt because of grad school.

I had been living in China for five years and I wanted to come back to California, so in a way it was a just a good way for me to come home.

Rian’s book Changsha was the culmination of living in China for five years and completed during graduate school at the University of California Santa Cruz

Rian Dundon

I knew that Berkeley had the journalism school and initially that was where I thought I was headed. But I’m really a documentary photographer, not a photojournalist. I’m not interested in spot news assignments.

While I was researching my options I found this small program at UC Santa Cruz that was in the film and digital media department, but at the time it was in the social sciences division that actually switched halfway through my first year called social documentary, so it’s kind of open-ended multi-genres … you can do films/video, you can be a writer, you can be a photographer or a combination of anything. It’s using social science research as a way to do documentary work. It’s essentially a way to apply an academic rigor to long-term documentary work. It was perfect for me and the work that I do.

MJ: You were already a pretty accomplished documentary photographer. What did you hope to get out of grad school that you weren’t getting out of your professional career already?

RD: Part of it was that I got a job as a teaching assistant, my tuition was free, and my TA job paid a livable salary. I also got access to a lot of grant money to finish the long-term project I had been working on in Changsha, China. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t gone to grad school because there is so much money available for grad students and faculty for doing research, that money enabled me to finish the project and publish my first book. Grad school gave me a soft landing when I came back to the US.

I was freelancing in China, but I wasn’t exactly living the high life. The cost of living over there is so low so that I was just able to get by. But eventually I was being faced with, “What do I do now?”

I had done so much work in China and I had a sense of what I wanted to do with the work, but I needed time to really pull it all together. I thought grad school would be a good way to find the time to wrap up the project, get some feedback from other people, back it up with some solid academic research, and do some writing.

MJ: How did you go about applying for grad school?

RD: I just researched it online and followed their protocols; there’s a lot of essay writing and stuff like that.

I had to put together a portfolio, and there was an essay you had to write about what your research might be, and other things about your background and your career in the field. They were looking for people who were already established or had some professional experience.

MJ: What do you hope your grad degree is going to do for you?

RD: Honestly, I’m not sure it’s gonna do anything. It’s not like I’m desperately trying to get a teaching job or anything. I am interested in teaching but I also think it is something that will fall into place later as I make more work.

I have tried to apply for teaching jobs but most departments want you to have an MFA so I get disqualified from those positions. I’m applying for a job at [deleted] for a tenure track photo professor job but I’m afraid that they’re gonna just toss my application away because I have an MA not an MFA. They want someone with a terminal degree, two years’ teaching, etc.

MJ: I’m not sure that’s true. You’re qualified, but you are uniquely qualified; by that I mean you can’t just be plugged into any available slot within an established curriculum. You have to find the right position.

After talking to five or six of you who are all looking for teaching jobs I might have some ideas, so indulge me for a minute while I give you some unsolicited advice, You all seem to be trying to plug into an existing position, like teaching Photo 101, because that’s traditionally where new teachers get placed. I think that’s a mistake; you should be proposing new intermediate-level courses that you are uniquely qualified to teach. I got my first teaching job by proposing a color photography class back when no one was teaching color photography. Every course I teach now at NYU is a course I originally wrote because I looked at the curriculum and found a gap.

I recently served on the search committee for an opening in our department. The job description we posted was very specific: We were looking for someone who could teach new media. We needed someone who was a working artist with strong conceptual, aesthetic, and critical skills. But they also needed to be able to teach practical digital/software skills.

We got over 500 applications, but when you really looked at the 500 applicants almost all of them were traditional photographers that had none of the qualifications we were looking for. Honestly, it seemed like most of them hadn’t even read the job description. There were only 15 or so that actually met the search criteria. Of those 15 there were only five that had a strong record of exhibiting and/or publishing. So, ultimately, there were only five viable candidates and the person we eventually hired was exactly the person we were looking for.

You are a guy who brings a lot of unique qualities and skills to the table. You’ve published two books, exhibited a lot, and lived in a different culture for five years. You’ve done some major documentary projects and you have two years’ teaching experience. I think your MA is actually a strength because you bring a unique perspective.

You shouldn’t be looking for a job teaching Photo 101. You should be proposing an intermediate/advanced-level ethnographic documentary class as an adjunct. A class like that would be a terrific addition to almost any program I can think of. It would also be a great class to teach as a summer course for adults and lots of departments are looking for ways to increase summer enrollment.

When you propose a class like that you are coming to the table with ideas and it makes you more valuable to the department you are applying to. It gets your foot in the door.

So there, that’s my little lecture.

What are you up to now?

RD: I just got a nice commission, a grant, to do a long-term project on education in Silicon Valley. I’ll be working on that for five or six months. I’m excited about that.

I had a show this past September in Zurich, I sold some pieces and that was great. I’m doing a couple of jobs here and there.

I am writing more. My new book is being featured in Time magazine’s Lightbox that will come out next week and they are letting me write the article as well.

I’m making a living piecemeal, just trying to get as many things as I can and putting it all together.

MJ: Well, the truth is that’s pretty much how we all do it. I couldn’t make a living doing just one of the things I do. My commercial practice pays for some things, teaching pays for other things. Writing doesn’t really pay for anything but it’s rewarding on other levels.

RD: The primary ways people earn a living with a camera—shooting weddings for example—don’t really interest me. I’d rather branch out into other fields or media for work where I can learn new things while continuing to inform my photographic practice.

One thing I can say, and I’m really proud of, is that I’ve never compromised. I’ve never done anything I don’t want to do with photography.

A Time magazine Lightbox feature on Rian’s newest body of work about returning to California

Photos and text by Rian Dundon

Case Study

ELIZABETH MORAN

www.elizabethmoran.com/

Dual degree MFA Fine Arts, MA Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts

Interview

MJ: So you’re kind of interesting because after you graduated from undergrad you got a big job as an art director in advertising. It was the kind of job most advertising professionals would envy as an entry-level step into a lucrative career. What made you decide to go back to grad school?

EM: It’s true that I was very lucky to land a job like that right out of undergrad, especially during the recession. I keep in touch with a few people from those days, and if I had stayed, I think I would be making somewhere around $150,000 a year by now.

When I left, my title was “Senior Art Director.” I was leading campaign strategies and things like that, so really I was on a successful track. If this art thing doesn’t pan out, I’m very glad to have a solid backup plan! When I decided to go to grad school, I had been doing advertising for four years. Once I was promoted to Senior Art Director, I got bored. I had figured it out. And I saw my life ahead of me just being more of the same exact thing. I was becoming more and more frustrated with the amount of energy I was spending on creating something for someone else, either a supervisor or a client.

The great thing about my agency job was that they were surprisingly flexible, so for four years they let me cut my hours (from 60 to 40!) for a month during the summer, so I could come back to NYU to teach in the summer high school photo program.

I was the night and weekend teacher for the summer program during that time, so I was basically working 80 + hours a week during that month, which was very intense. But I really enjoyed it! I found that I looked forward to that one insane month. I would lose all of my friends and everything for four weeks, but I’d be back in the darkroom teaching, you know, having inspiring conversations with students. I noticed that the only time I was really compelled to make my own work was when I was teaching. After doing that for a few years it became all too obvious how much it meant to me. I decided to listen to the voice that was calling me back into the fine-art world.

MJ: And why did you choose California College of the Arts (CCA) for grad school? You had a pretty established network here on the East Coast.

EM: CCA was always my first choice. I had met Jessica Ingram when she was teaching at NYU, and she was the first to tell me about the program (and she teaches there now).

I was very excited to work with Jim Goldberg, Christina Seely, Todd Hido, and David Maisel. The option for a dual degree was also very attractive both conceptually and financially because I could graduate in three years with both an MFA and an MA (which opens the possibility for me to pursue a PhD later).

The first year I applied to grad school, CCA was the only school I applied to. I was accepted and really excited, but then I got my acceptance package, and the offer was surprisingly low. I was so upset, and I called everyone I knew to try to figure out a way to make it work financially, but the conclusion was that I couldn’t go, I just couldn’t afford it. I had paid for most of NYU myself (and I’m still paying …), so basically going to CCA would have doubled my amount of student debt. Going to grad school with little to no help was just a complete impossibility. So I had to decline.

Then I had a year, my fifth year out of undergrad, for “soul searching,” during which time I was still working at the ad agency. I continued teaching at NYU and at the International Center for Photography on the side and really focused on making my own work. I spent that year strategizing how to make getting an MFA make sense for me.

House Set at the Armory. For her MFA thesis Elizabeth Moran spent several months photographing the sets at “The Armory” a film studio that specializes in producing adult films

Elizabeth Moran

Then when it was time to reapply, I applied to eight schools, four on the East Coast and four on the West Coast and a range of state schools, like Hunter and UCLA, to private schools, like CCA again and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). I was pleasantly surprised, and I was accepted by almost every school. I hadn’t planned it, but after getting accepted to enough schools, I thought maybe I could negotiate a little and that’s exactly what happened. This time around, RISD offered me a fantastic merit scholarship, and CCA matched it. It was a tough choice (I was very close to choosing RISD), but CCA’s dual-degree program, among other great things, was too good of an opportunity to pass up. In the end, I paid for one year of grad school, and I was there for three years and received two degrees. Also a while at CCA, I was awarded a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship from the City of San Francisco and an All College Honors Scholarship from CCA, so I ended up receiving even more funding by the time I completed graduate school.

MJ: Now tell me what you got out of grad school?

EM: That’s a huge question, and it’s super-specific to every individual!

Grad school is like a “make your own adventure” in a lot of ways. It really depends on how you want to spend your time, the advisors you work with, your relationships with your peers, etc. Some people completely transform, while others just hone what they have been doing for years. Some people get absolutely nothing out of grad school. I was one of those transformational cases, I think.

The great thing about CCA was that it is very interdisciplinary. I would be in critiques with people who are sculptors, painters, performance artists, etc., and they would critique my photographs. I think it was challenging for everyone in a really important contemporary way. I think media specificities are bad for everyone (like photographers only talking to photographers) because you end up in an echo chamber. I feel like now I can have conversations with other artists no matter their medium. And in the majority of the group shows that I have been a part of, I am often the only artist working with photography. It is so inspiring to have my work be in conversation with everything from weaving and sculpture. I feel like that opens up the dialogue in an exciting way for everybody involved.

MJ: What about the critical studies aspect?

EM: It totally blew my mind. It was nothing like I was expecting … in a great way. I didn’t know what I was I was in for, but coming out of Tisch and having worked so closely with Shelley Rice and Deborah Willis in undergrad, I knew I wanted academic rigor as part of my graduate experience. Visual and Critical Studies is not art history in any way, but a way of thinking through contemporary culture (visually or otherwise) via critical theory. And in complete contrast to my studio practice, it involved a lot of reading and academic research and writing.

I loved having conversations with writers and curators, not just with other artists, as another strategy for opening up how I thought about my own work in the studio. It was an inspiring group of people to be working with, students and faculty alike.

And in general, the program really clarified for me the idea that both writing and art is a way of thinking and communicating.

MJ: Can you give me an example?

EM: One class I took that was really important to me was called “Sites,” and it was all about the idea of “place.” One theorist we read, Doreen Massey, argued that space is simply made up of layers of time. That idea ended up being a huge influence on my current work with paranormal investigators. She never talks about photography in her book, but I think it’s so photographic. In this class, we read a range of texts and writers who had different interpretations of what makes up “space” and “place,” and that is a reading list that I will be mining for years to come in my studio practice.

Since graduating, I have not pursued academic writing on a serious level (… yet), but I am so glad to have this background. I feel like I have a vocabulary for seeing and understanding the world around me, art or otherwise.

MJ: So you did an MFA thesis, which were your photographs of the porn-film stages at the Armory (a film studio in San Francisco that makes pornographic movies), and then you also did a VCS thesis for your MA. What did you do for that?

Stage Set, The Armory

Elizabeth Moran

EM: My MA thesis focused on the conception of photography as evidence by looking at early spiritualist photography, specifically the nineteenth-century French Spiritualist movement and its most famous photographer, Edouard Isidore Buguet, who was eventually put on trial for fraud (and acquitted due to the photographic evidence at hand, despite his confession). I was writing my VCS thesis while also actively working on my current project on the paranormal.

An important part of the VCS thesis process is that we are required to write an academic thesis, which is usually around 100 pages, and on top of that we then must write a 20-page magazine version of that paper. It’s a terrific idea because you have to write this very academic tome, but you also have to write it as a populist piece that anyone can understand. So

I wrote two versions of my thesis and gave a public, formal talk on my topic. It was a great way to finish graduate school.

One thing I want to say about the importance of graduate school, MFA or MA, and this is something I will absolutely carry with me for the rest of my life, is just remembering to ask the question, “Does this medium make sense?” When should I be making photographs, when should I be writing, when should I be using video or audio or found objects, etc.? One medium cannot do it all, and different media offer different advantages, references, etc. If I’m trying to communicate an idea, the choice of medium should be secondary to the idea.

It seems so simple and obvious, but as someone who has been working in photography since middle school, it was a revelation.

Case Study

ALEXANDRA PACHECO GARCIA

www.alexandrapachecogarcia.com

MFA, University of California, Irvine

Interview

MJ: How’s it going? How is life after grad school?

APG: The first year out of grad school is always a little rough. You know you spend three years in a bubble making your own work and you get out and you’re like, “Oh shit, I’m in debt, I need to get a job, and the economy is horrible. So what happens next?!”

I worked as a studio manager for an artist named Sharon Lockhart. She was blowing up in Europe, so when I came in she had all of these museum retrospectives going on. It was awesome except I thought it was going to be just a part-time job, just four days a week and then one day off, which was perfect for a studio day for me. But what it was actually like was seven days a week, on 10–12-hour days, which was just brutal for me. It was not really a good job for someone who wants to be a good artist; it wasn’t a good fit. I am not there anymore.

Currently, I have two part-time jobs. I work as a production manager at a fine-art photo lab and I actually got hooked up with this place through Sharon who prints all of her work here. I’m here three days a week then one day a week I teach an Intro to Digital class at a community college a couple of hours away. Then I have a day off!

Between those things it’s like using two different parts of my brain and it’s a lot of activity. It’s paying the bills so that’s great.

MJ: I have to tell you a funny story. Whenever any of the faculty at school talks to our undergrad students about how to apply for grad school we always use you as the example of how to do it. You’re our poster child for “how to apply to grad school.”

APG: [laughing] What do you mean?!

MJ: You did it perfectly. You came back to meet with all of us who were writing your recommendations. You showed us new work, you told us what you wanted out of your postgrad experience. All of those things help us. You even sent thank you notes and told us where you ended up.

What you might not even know is that I actually got a phone call from one of the schools, it might have been UC Irvine, to ask me follow-up questions about you. The fact that you and I had met, and I’d seen recent work helped me with that conversation.

An installation view of Alexandra Pacheco Garcia’s multimedia project: “Swiftly Go the Days”

Alexandra Pacheco Garcia

So, how do you like teaching?

APG: I love it! What was rad about grad school was that we were able to teach in our second year, we taught undergrad classes. Not all grad programs give you the opportunity to do that.

I’m teaching in a community college now so I have a whole different range of students and I like that. I have a 50-year-old podiatrist, alongside 18-year-old kids out of high school, so it’s a lot of different people with a lot of a different agendas and levels within photography. I like it more than just art-school kids. The conversations are different; they’re not just based on technique and all of the photo stuff, it’s based on these different agendas the people bring to the course.

But teaching did scare me in the beginning. I don’t see myself as like a facilitative person necessarily, like “I’m the talking head of the room and I know everything.” But now I’m used to it. It’s something different, inspiring and motivating.

MJ: So where did you end up going to grad school?

APG: I went to University of California, Irvine for graduate school on the West Coast; it’s a very critical theory based school. Chris Burden came out of there and so did Gary Doss.

I think the big thing I got out of grad school was community, which was something I didn’t have prior to coming in. I moved to the West Coast because I had to get out of New York. I came to visit and fell in love with the climate and the people I met, and with the intention of potentially coming to grad school since there are so many programs out here.

I had a lot of friends here, but I didn’t know any artists. I was making work for a couple of years in a void because I had no one to talk to about it with, so I went to grad school to try and “find my tribe,” and to give myself the commitment to my craft … giving myself three years to just make work.

One thing I wanted was a three-year program. I felt that if I was going to commit to this thing that two years was not going to be enough time for me to get the most out of it.

I applied to UCLA. UC Riverside, Cal Arts, Yale … and some of those schools are insanely expensive. I ended up at UC Irvine, partly because it was a subsidized school, which helped make it affordable for me to do a three-year program.

What was also important to me was that it was a joint program that was interdisciplinary. It’s a program with sculptors and painters and performance artists and not another photo-centric place like NYU. I also felt like I was moving towards other kinds of work that wasn’t … well I think the vehicle was photographic, but wasn’t all photo. It was performative, there was experimental stuff.

MJ: Did you get what you wanted from it?

APG: Pretty much. The one thing I was hoping to get, but didn’t, was a mentor. Which is a total bummer.

There were specific people I wanted to work with at Irvine like Yolanda Rainer and a few different other people at different schools. I came at a particular point in time when people were on their way out. There were a ton of people retiring in my second year, or they were on sabbatical, so I felt like my class was a lost class. The faculty wasn’t really around. I was hoping to find someone who would take me under their wing and that really didn’t happen.

But what I didn’t get from my teachers, I did get from my peers. I can count on both hands the number of people I can call and trust to ask them to look at my work. That network is invaluable.

It’s an instant community you get when you go to grad school and then you have all your classmates who are exhibiting. I’m in a network with people where I can be in group shows with them, or they can hook me up with opportunities. Every aspect of my life, my apartment, my studio, those are all connections I got from people I knew from school.

A still life from the series “what remains.” In her artist statement Alexandra writes: “This series of photographs and related video work, functions in part as documentation of private performance—a record of simple gestures and small, ephemeral still lives. But it is also something else, something less definitive. Bound up in the act of making is a meditation on loss and absence as well as a focused interaction of the corporal body in the present moment.”

Alexandra Pacheco Garcia

CAREERS IN EDUCATION AND ART THEARPY

Case Study

JESSICA INGRAM

www.jessingram.com

Associate Professor, Undergraduate Photography and Graduate Fine Art, and Chair, Photography Program, California College of Art and Crafts

Jessica Ingram

In my conversations with both young photographers and my contemporaries who work as commercial photographers, there seems to be a prevailing notion that getting a tenure-track teaching job is some kind of cushy safety net. I can tell you from experience that nothing could be farther from the truth. While I always loved teaching, it has never been easy, and it’s getting harder all the time.

But what about the old truism “Those who can, do. And those who can’t, teach”?

Well, there are certain truisms that just aren’t true: plain and simple.

One of the main problems with that statement, at least in terms of university-level teaching appointments, is that in order to even be considered for a position you have to have a proven and impressive track record as a practicing professional, complete with numerous exhibitions and publications.

Then, if you do get a job teaching in an arts-based program, part of your contractual agreement will require that you maintain an active professional career and/or fine-art practice. This means that anyone teaching at a university level is actually maintaining at least two full-time careers simultaneously, a career as an artist/practitioner and a career as a teacher.

The single most valuable—in fact indispensable—tool any teacher can have is their credibility. This is why it is so vital for any teacher in the arts to maintain an active practice outside of class. No teacher can ever afford to coast because every semester there’s a fresh audience of inquisitive young adults watching you, and they aren’t easily impressed.

Every one of my colleagues among the full-time faculty in my department is also maintaining a career in photography, either as an artist, writer, or working professional. They are professional thinkers, historians, and artists who occupy hard-won positions at one of the world’s most elite universities. They are recipients of MacArthur, Guggenheim, and National Arts fellowships. They exhibit and publish regularly in addition to being some of the most professional and adept teachers I have ever encountered.

Teaching is hard work, though I can understand why it might look easy to someone on the other side. Being a professional photographer also looks easy and by now we should all know the fallacy of that idea.

In addition to actual time spent in class doing demonstrations or critiquing student work there are a host of other duties that go on behind the scenes: writing curriculum, faculty meetings, committee service, student advising, and the constant barrage of student emails. It never seems like that much, but it all adds up to a real full-time commitment.

What is true: Teaching does give working artists a stable financial platform to work from. It might not pay terribly well compared with a highlevel career as a working professional but it is a steady paycheck, and there are other benefits: health insurance, retirement plans, access to facilities, and often faculty housing.

But all of those perks and financial security are actually beside the point; most of us who teach would do it for free (which is why universities can get away with paying us so little). The real perk to a teaching career is working in a fertile intellectual environment where we are constantly challenged and nurtured by a community of young artists who are hungry to invent themselves.

In her artist’s statement Jessica Ingram writes that her work “is motivated by her desire to understand how people relate, what they long for, and what motivates the choices they make.”

It’s interesting to note that those qualities should also be the guiding principles that every good teacher should live by.

Armstrong Rubber Company, Natchez, Mississippi, 2007. For years Jessica traveled the South revisiting and photographing sites of historical significance to the Civil Rights movement. On this site February 27, 1967, Wharlest Jackson, the treasurer of the local NAACP chapter, was killed by a car bomb left by Klansmen, shortly after he received a promotion to a position formerly reserved for whites.

Jessica Ingram

Law Office, Pulaski, Tennessee, 2006. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in this law office on Christmas Eve, 1865. The original historical marker, which has since been bolted to the wall backwards, reads: “Ku Klux Klan organized in this law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones December 24, 1865. Names of original organizers: Calvin E. Jones, John B. Kennedy, Frank O. McCord, John C. Lester, Richard R. Reed, James R. Crowe.”

Jessica Ingram

Interview

MJ: I had a few things I wanted to talk to you about. One of them being graduate school, but primarily your career as a teacher.

How did you end up teaching photography?

JI: I did a lot of community-based teaching through college, and after college, and I’ve always been interested in it. I’m stimulated by teaching, specifically the variety of encounters with students, problem solving with them as they grow as artists, thinkers, and storytellers, and the unexpectedness of each day. Then I ended up at graduate school, which was originally not something I planned on doing.

MJ: Why weren’t you looking to go to graduate school?

JI: My financial situation was precarious. During my undergrad education … from year to year, I never knew if I was going to be able to afford to finish, so financially I didn’t think grad school was an option for me.

MJ: Finances are a huge issue for many people when it comes to grad school. It’s just daunting to look at adding the burden of so much debt to your life.

JI: Exactly, and I came out of undergrad with a lot of debt. I was there on scholarships and loans, and my mom who was already a full-time C.P.A. took a second job waiting tables to help me out.

But then … after college I was working for a newspaper, making art, and teaching a little bit on the side. Hank Willis Thomas, who is a good friend from undergrad at NYU, recruited me to come to CCA when he was getting his MFA there. Then I met Larry Sultan and Stephen Goldstine, the head of the graduate program at the time, who also encouraged me to attend. I was able to get a full scholarship, and ultimately to get my MFA.

After grad school I still wasn’t really thinking about teaching because I was so engaged with making work, but I was recruited to start a non-profit program called Fostering Art where I taught photography and storytelling to foster youth in the bay area. Hank and I also applied to team teach a course in the mentored teaching program at CCA that we taught for two semesters in the undergrad photo program. That was when I really started thinking about teaching at a college level more seriously.

I left the non-profit and CCA, and stopped teaching for a little while to focus on making work. Then a group of us, including Hank Thomas, Ryan Alexiev, and myself started the Cause Collective, which is an art collaborative that we still work together in. Our first project was a multimedia installation in the Oakland Airport.

But it was really Deb Willis (Chair of the NYU Photography and Imaging Dept, and mother of Hank Willis Thomas) who started to get me back into teaching. She introduced me to Wendel White, who was running a photo program outside of Philly, and I was ready for a move, so I moved to Philly and taught there for a semester. I didn’t stay longer because the Cause Collective received the Oakland Airport commission, so I returned to California for several months.

After the commission ended, I returned east and started teaching as an adjunct at both Parsons and NYU, and between the two jobs I was pretty much teaching full time. I found that I really liked the balance of teaching and making art. I loved being in New York, but factors led me to start looking for more stability and income, so that’s when I applied for a full-time position at CCA. The additional benefits, health care, retirement, etc., that come with a fulltime position start to become more important as you get older. And the semester schedule, summers off, and sabbaticals support being able to continue working as an artist.

It’s funny, I didn’t go to grad school because I wanted to be a teacher; it was just a series of events that led here. At CCA we have so many students applying because they want to teach and I don’t think that’s a very good reason to go to grad school.

MJ: I agree completely. Whenever people ask me about teaching I always stress that you have to teach from a point of view; you have to be an artist first and you can’t think of teaching as a fallback position. You have to be a working artist who teaches, not a teacher who makes artwork on the side.

What do you get from teaching and what does teaching bring to your work as an artist?

JI: I totally agree that being an artist who teaches is key. All the energy I have to be a photographer and an artist is all of the energy that I also have towards teaching. I don’t know how to teach without that level of enthusiasm!

Teaching requires that I stay engaged with the contemporary art world and the current critical texts, but more than anything, it requires that I stay engaged with my practice. I think that my teaching suffers when my practice suffers.

My teaching and my practice move in sync with me, and I’ve been lucky to be in an institution that encourages that. If I’m thinking of certain ideas in my work that I want to develop, I can bring that into the curriculum.

Teaching also makes me more aware when I am working … I’ll be in my studio or out making work and I’ll become aware of a strategy I’m employing, then I’ll think that I want to be aware of what I did because I want to describe it to students. There is greater awareness and articulation that comes when you know you have to explain it to others.

MJ: Exactly. I’ve always thought that was the big side benefit. There’s a saying, “nothing teaches like teaching” and it’s true. In medical school students have to watch a procedure, then do the procedure, and finally teach the procedure to someone else. It’s an essential component to their education because when you teach someone something you have to anticipate their questions in advance.

JI: Teaching also requires me to follow my own best advice! Because I have to give my best advice to students, and sometimes I realize that I am not always doing that myself! I’ll hear myself give advice to a student during critique for example, and think, “I really gotta do that for myself.”

Sometimes, I’ll be helping a student in one of my directed projects classes, or working on an edit with one of my grad students … being engaged with them, helping them take an idea of theirs from concept to form, that process fuels my own ideas as well. I often leave a class where my student’s issues are similar to issues that have come up about my own work, and the way I helped them problem solve can be generative for me as well. When that happens I write it all down for strategy.

My undergrad photo students are all pretty amazing, and I teach in the graduate interdisciplinary department as well; so in addition to the photography students I’m also engaging with sculptors, writers, and performers. It’s a very creative space in which to reside.

MJ: Tell me what your job is like as the Chair?

JI: It takes me a little out of teaching, so it’s not my favorite thing because that engagement piece that we were just talking about is missing. Being the Chairperson is an administrative job.

What I do love about it is the exposure to my colleagues, and this job means I get to spend more time with them. As Chair I do a lot of advising and serving as a sounding board to students, and as the Chair you often get into a lot—sometimes too much—of the nitty gritty of student crisis!

One part of my job as Chair that I particularly enjoy is recruiting. I do a lot of recruiting for selfish reasons, because I want our department to have the same strong sense of community that I had as an undergrad. I want that for my students because that was given to me.

MJ: What about university politics? I’ve always felt lucky because there is virtually no infighting within our department. We sometimes have little tiffs about inconsequential things, but at the heart of the matter we all respect each other for who we are and what we bring to the department. But as Chair … you have interface with the larger university administration where the politics can be intense.

JI: I’d say it’s very similar here. I respect my fellow faculty. We respect each other. There are differences of method or opinion, and room to have dialogue about it. Like you, I also try to steer clear of college politics but I think my reasons are different: I am constantly reminding myself of the bigger picture for my life. I do not want my career as an administrator to become my legacy, so I don’t necessarily volunteer for every committee. Don’t get me wrong. I do my service, and I’m a good administrator. I want to be there for my students, I want to be part of a strong program, but I’m also very protective of the time I have for my creative work.

Larry Sultan said something to me when we talked about me taking the job at CCA. He said, “This could be your kiss of death.”

MJ: I know exactly what you mean but spell it out for me.

JI: I think he thought that it would be easy for my energies to become misdirected, and it’s true. There are hundreds of micro issues within any large university, but those aren’t my fights, those aren’t my investment. My students and my work are my investment. Larry wanted me to protect my creative time and investments, and I work hard to do that.

MJ: Exactly. Personally, I always feel like I’m on the brink of failure in any given aspect of my life. If my commercial career is thriving, then I am not doing my personal fine-art work, if my fine-art work is going well then I’m not paying enough attention to my family. If I’m being a good father and husband then I’m not paying enough attention to my students. I’m never good at everything at the same time. I’m always just about to fail at something and when you have so many demands pulling you in so many different directions it’s easy for your personal work to get shoved to the bottom of the list.

On the flipside, I think there’s also a danger in teachers taking too much satisfaction in the accomplishments of their students. I think we both know teachers who invest so much in their students that they don’t do any of their own work anymore. I also know that I have fallen into that trap at times.

JI: Yes, and that’s one of the things that Larry and I also talked about. If you try to be the world’s best teacher; be there for students, be available for them all the time, then you will fail at everything else. I think sometimes you have to cozy up to the idea of not being perfect in all aspects of your life, and at the same time. I think my students know that I’m there for them, but I think they also have to realize that I can’t be there for them all the time.

Same with teaching: there are classes I’d like to propose, but I’m not always going to, at least not now. Preparing a new class is a lot of work, and that takes time away from the time I’m able to spend on my own work. It’s all about balancing your goals and priorities, and knowing that they shift and change.

Juliet, Head Queen in Charge, Columbus, Georgia, 2013 from the series Love Rich Land

Jessica Ingram

MJ: [laughing] A few years ago the university offered a sizable grant to fund new equipment for any department that created a certain type of new-media class. Our department desperately needed new video gear so I proposed a new course and the next thing you know we got a grant for the purchase of $20,000 in new gear.

Well, that was all great; the only flaw in my plan was that I now had to teach the course! That new course required me to develop a whole new set of production skills, learn three new computer programs, and write a curriculum in an area I wasn’t an expert in.

Ultimately, it’s been a good thing for both the department and me personally, but people don’t know how much work is involved in creating a new course from scratch. I think the class is an important addition to our curriculum but I also admit that I’m still not very good at teaching that class.

One of the other big themes that has emerged in the process of writing this book is the idea of mentorship and how important that is. Can you talk specifically about what that mentorship of others has meant to you, and how that helps you to be a mentor to other people?

JI: Larry was my advisor during graduate school and he also gave me a lot of advice when I was accepting my job here. He passed away a few months after I was hired. Larry was just very honest, incredibly thoughtful and generous, even to the point of telling me that the job could be bad for me as an artist, as a serious word of caution, and that honesty was incredibly helpful.

Deb Willis has been just as honest with me in her relating her own experience, but in a way, she has also gone beyond that because she’ll also give me direct advice on whether I should do this, or that, or something else. That’s an incredibly generous act on her part, because … [laughing] it requires actually listening to me! Knowing where I’m coming from, and helping me figure out what I need. Deb was a great mentor in that she helped me see how to make things work for you, work for your goals, work for your investment, and work for the picture of what you want your life to be. She is also skilled at working with people and balancing more than I can imagine.

I hear my mentors in my head all the time. I hear Larry in my head every time I teach, and of course now I have to try and be that voice to others based on the goals of that individual. You mentor different people in different ways based on your relationship with that person. If I have a student in my class for three months then that’s different from the kind of long-term relationship I might have with some of my graduate advisees where the relationship is longer and much more open.

I even feel it when my colleagues and I have conversations. I often feel like we are mentoring one another. I feel like I have my art practice, and that can be very individual, but I also have my teaching practice that can be very collaborative. That collaboration with my academic peers is so very important. I learn so much from listening and watching my colleagues and it feeds my creativity. I think more broadly as a result of that collaboration than I would on my own.

MJ: And your relationships with the people you mentor changes as they eventually outgrow needing you. I have so many ex-students and assistants who have gone so far beyond anything that I’ve done in my own career. There’s a point where they pass into becoming your friends and peers, and I think you have to embrace that instead of being threatened.

Tell me about the work that you do with Cause Collective, and can you explain what it is succinctly?

JI: The Cause Collective is a team of artists, designers and ethnographers creating innovative art in the public realm. Our projects explore and enliven public spaces by creating a dynamic conversation between issues, sites and the public audience. We create large multi media and sculptural public art installations. For example at the airport in Oakland we were commissioned to create Along the Way, a video mosaic including 2000 video portraits of East Bay residents.

In Birmingham we did another multimedia installation called The Long March. It’s composed of 27 video monitors that reflect the local history through archival footage and original material we produced. It’s designed to be seen as you are walking past it so the viewer is mirroring and participating in the process as they are viewing the piece.

The Cause Collective has been an amazing experience because it’s a wonderful complement to my individual art practice and my teaching. My art practice can be a series of crazy peaks and valleys, and teaching while full of the unexpected can sometimes become routine (which is actually great in its own way). When my partners and I work on one of our collaborative projects it’s intense, it has a very specific goal, and a very specific beginning and end. The process is inspiring, really lively and energizing, and I reap all the benefits of collaboration, which is making something I wouldn’t have realized on my own, and learn a ton in the process. I love the energy of ideas and strategies bouncing off one another as we sit and brainstorm, storyboard, and make work together.

Jessica Ingram

Along the Way, installation by The Cause Collective at Oakland International Airport

The Cause Collective

The Long March, video installation by The Cause Collective, Birmingham International Airport

The Cause Collective

MJ: What classes do you teach at CCA now?

JI: At CCA I teach senior projects in the undergrad photo program, and I have recently come back to teaching an intermediate class on medium format and critique that I wrote when I first got here. I teach a seminar every year in the graduate program, and I teach individual units [one-on-one meetings] with grad students in their studios.

MJ: Give me an example of what a graduate seminar might be.

JI: One of the seminars I have taught is Dialogues and Practices, which is a first-year seminar and predominantly critique, but there’s also a lot of writing towards advancing the students’ self-reflexivity. I also teach a photo seminar for grad students working with image-making which is primarily a studio practice critique seminar.

I have some classes I’ve written that are studio research labs; these are six-person seminars and they meet outside of the classroom. These labs have different areas of focus, and one example is one I did on what happens to work after it’s made; essentially what do you do with your work? We met with artists including Todd Hido and Allesandra Sangunetti, and publishers Jason Fulford, Paul Schiek, and John DeMerritt as well as San Francisco gallerists to talk about different platforms and contexts for getting work out in the world through exhibitions and/or publishing.

MJ: There’s another section of this book that is dedicated specifically to grad school and I want to pick your brain about what you think a student should look for in a grad program. For example, I think one of the reasons so many of my NYU alumni do so well at CCA is because our program does a pretty great job of teaching them photography and the critical thinking around photography, but they don’t have the broad interdisciplinary exposure to the other mediums the way a Cooper Union student might. Would you agree with that?

JI: I would agree. The fact is, I didn’t really do my due diligence when I was picking a grad school so I didn’t know then as much as I do now. I tell people looking at going to grad school to look at the faculty, the character of the program, and the location. You’re ultimately looking at potential mentors, so you want to make sure that the faculty you want to study with will actually be there. I also suggest that applying to a school that’s located in a part of the country where you’ll want to stay for a few years because the faculty and students you will meet become your connections and the people that will be helping you throughout your practice.

MJ: What advice would you give to a young photographer who wanted to teach or was applying for a teaching position? What are the mistakes you see people make? What makes one candidate more attractive than another?

JI: That’s a great question, and it happens that I just read applications for a position in the photo program at CCA, so here’s my advice, and take it with a grain of salt because institutions can differ in what they are looking for.

We are most excited about candidates that have a range in their practice. So they are image-makers, and maybe they also work in multimedia, or performance, or have an aspect of community involvement in their work. Ideas and concerns that candidates are engaged in a variety of ways is exciting to us and to our students. We also aren’t going to hire someone right out of grad school. The candidate doesn’t need to have had an assistant professor appointment already, but they do need some teaching experience. I encourage adjuncts to try to vary the classes they are teaching, and to try to teach at various levels in an undergraduate program.

Adjuncts should try to do some department service as well so they understand a little bit about how institutions work. Know where you are applying and write specifically about why you want to teach there in your cover letter.

RIP Gusto, Richland, GA from the series Love Rich Land

Jessica Ingram

Case Study

DANA LIEBOWITZ: LICENSED CREATIVE ARTS THERAPIST

While he was hospitalized with tuberculosis in 1939, the British painter Adrian Hill found that sketching helped him pass the time and aided in his own recovery. Eventually he began to teach painting and drawing to his fellow patients and in 1945 he published his findings in his book Art versus Illness, thus planting the seeds for the profession of art therapy as we know it today.

An arts education has traditionally been a separate field of study taught outside of mainstream academia. The École des Beaux-Arts is generally credited as the first formal art school, but the school that created the modern paradigm was the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, where studio arts, crafts, and architecture were taught as a cohesive curriculum, with scant attention to studies in the traditional liberal arts and sciences. Most contemporary art and architecture programs like the Cooper Union, and the Rhode Island School of Design still use a modernized form of the Bauhaus curriculum as their model.

In the late 1960s and 1970s an increasing number of traditional liberal arts universities began incorporating studio arts programs into their liberal arts curriculum or offering BFA degrees with traditional liberal arts requirements; the result was an explosive cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines that continues to this day. In a world that relies ever more on images and symbols as a primary form of communication, a visual education is increasingly viewed as an integral component to a traditional liberal arts field of study.

It was in this experimental, free-wheeling, intellectual, and academic environment of the late twentieth century that art therapy evolved rapidly into a recognized branch of psychology that incorporates a blend of traditional psychotherapy with unique art-specific methodologies for the diagnosis, analysis and treatment of patients. Art therapy has proven itself successful in areas where traditional therapies are often less than effective: such as post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, and depression among prison inmates. It is particularly successful in treating victims of pediatric trauma.

Dana Liebowitz

Dana Liebowitz is a perfect example of a young woman who has flourished in this academic melting pot of ideas that blurs the traditional boundaries of fine art and science. She is also representative of many art students that have found their calling in a profession that uses the arts in service to others.

Interview

MJ: So tell me about how you came to be an art therapist—you got your undergrad degree at Bennington right?

DL: Right, I was always involved in the arts growing up and I always saw my future as a career in the arts. Part of the reason I chose Bennington was because, though I applied to a lot of traditional art schools as well, I felt that a liberal arts education would open more opportunities for me.

MJ: I think that’s very common; in fact I think that’s one of the main reasons so many parents feel more comfortable with the program at NYU over traditional art schools.

DL: Bennington allows you to create your own major so I spent almost all my time in studio art classes, but by the time I graduated I had no idea of what I wanted to do with my life.

There were three years between college and graduate school, that … I think of them as my “lost years,” but they were also some of the most important years of my life because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

I knew that working at a gallery or a museum was a possibility, but it wasn’t the part of art that was interesting to me. I was interested in the creative process and the way art can bring people together and serve a higher purpose. I wasn’t interested in making art to make money. I felt like I didn’t belong in that part of the art world.

I worked at a bookstore, and a hardware store. I lived in Boston briefly and took some classes in auto CAD design as a possible career but it wasn’t a fit for me. At the same time I attended some drop-in lectures at Harvard on social justice, so I started trying to figure out a way to bridge my love of art with my interest in social justice.

I had heard of art therapy as a profession but I didn’t really know anything about it. It happened that I had a friend who was a practicing art therapist and as we talked about issues of social justice and possible ways I could bring art into social justice she encouraged me to look into art therapy as a professional possibility.

MJ: So by this time you had moved back to New York and you started looking for grad schools?

DL: Right. I applied to the grad programs for Art Therapy at both Pratt Institute and the School for Visual Arts, but SVA just felt right for me.

MJ: What’s the program like for art therapy?

DL: The SVA program is very arts based.

Right now in New York City there are three main art-therapy programs: Pratt, SVA, and NYU. If I had to categorize the approaches I’d say that NYU is known for being more psychoanalytic and traditional in their approach to therapy, and the art component is viewed as an enhancement to traditional therapy. Pratt is very arts based, in the sense that they see creating art as inherently therapeutic so the emphasis is on making art as therapy.

SVA is the newest program and I felt that it blended the two approaches: the traditional theory is there, but the emphasis is on making art, so it felt like the best fit for me.

MJ: What was your psychology background? Did you take any psych classes at Bennington?

DL: No, and I did have to take some prerequisite classes in order to get into the program. Just the basics, psychology 101, child development, abnormal psych. You also need experience with a variety of art materials, and a portfolio.

MJ: Were you specifically interested in working with children?

DL: Not at that time, but part of the program at SVA requires that you have to do two full-time internships, so I did my first-year internship at Montefiore Hospital where I was working with adults in an in-patient psychiatric unit. My second internship was working with kids who had experienced trauma. There is a misperception that art therapy is only for children. Art therapists work with people of all ages, in a variety of settings including hospitals, community centers, schools, prisons, and day treatment settings.

MJ: What is your day-to-day job like now?

DL: Now I work at a non-profit, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC). It’s a very old institution, established back in 1875. The society’s overall mission is very broad, but one of the major components is the Trauma Program, working with children aged 5 through 21.

So I work with children and their families who have experienced trauma. Most of the kids that I see have been referred through foster care, so I work with them individually, with their foster family, their biological parents, and with the system, whether that’s the foster care system or the legal system, criminal courts, etc.

MJ: Interesting. Do you see a lot of drug use?

DL: Surprisingly, not, but if I had a client with a drug abuse problem I’d probably refer them to a specialist. There are art therapists who specialize in addictions. Personally, I have little background or training in it, and feel I would need more experience to properly treat it.

My work now is focused on children and families that have experienced trauma. It could be a onetime trauma, like a car accident, but more often I see children who have experienced chronic, interpersonal trauma, such as abuse or neglect. When children have a traumatic formative experience, the result is often that they experience the world as unsafe and unreliable. I work to support the child and family to create an emotionally and physically safe environment, and safe relationships.

MJ: Without violating your ethics, can you give me an example?

DL: Sure, but I think one thing to remember is that in most cases this kind of abuse or neglect is something that has been passed down through generations. Often times the parents suffered similar trauma, maybe they grew up in an environment where they were being sexually or physically abused themselves, so many of the parents I work with are people who want the best for their kids but they don’t always have the skills, given their own childhood experiences.

MJ: So you’re dealing with the parents and the children at the same time?

DL: Whenever possible, that’s the ideal situation. From my experience, working with the family makes the most impact. I might meet with the whole family and then meet with them individually as well. The goal is to change the family dynamic so that the parents can understand how their behavior and history affect their child, and begin to create new ways of relating.

MJ: And how does art come into this?

DL: Art and play are children’s natural language. At the beginning of treatment, art helps me to establish a relationship with the child. They aren’t going to just open up to a stranger about their situation, but through art and play a child can begin to relay their experiences. This is not always a conscious process; the unconscious has an incredible way of expressing itself through non-verbal and latent communication.

The art that the child makes provides me with an opening to the parents as well, when they can see the child’s artwork. If the child is willing for me to show their art to the parents, then they start to understand what the experience is from their child’s perspective. I also often encourage parents to make art. This supports the family’s communication, and gives the parents the opportunity to find new ways of expressing themselves.

I also do art projects with the whole family. I might have the whole family draw on the same piece of paper, and that immediately opens up a whole level of insight into the family dynamics: boundaries, space, and all the issues of sharing.

I also do a lot of mask and puppet making and that can introduce an element of role-play into the therapy.

MJ: I have to wonder, do the clients have any art skills? I mean when you say masks, I’m immediately back in art school mixing up paper-mache and paints. If I think about my own parents, they wouldn’t have a clue how to even start.

When your clients have no art training, how do you get them to make art?

DL: As an art therapist, I am not there to teach. I am there to facilitate and at times help with some of the technical issues. But an art therapist does that very differently from a traditional art teacher. We’re just giving them the basic tools to support them in expressing themselves. I’m very careful not to impose a style on them for instance.

The action figures used for art therapy represent a broader cross section of society than simple superheroes.

Art that is created in art therapy is not necessarily made to be shown to others. The intent is not to make something beautiful, although sometimes that is helpful as well. Art therapists make it clear to the clients that the art will not be judged or criticized by the therapist. The art is also just as private and confidential as anything that is said in a therapy session.

MJ: [laughing] Which is also why I can’t show any of it in your profile!

DL: Exactly.

MJ: So how do people find out about your organization? Is it like, “The police were called because a child comes into an emergency room, the child is taken into a foster home …?”

DL: That’s one scenario. To take that as an example: child protective services would be called and they would do an investigation, then depending on the findings they would either have services come into the home—a case worker employed by the state for example—and the situation would be dealt with in the home.

But in a more severe situation the child might be placed with a responsible relative or foster carer and that’s the point where I might be called in. In that case I would be working with both the child and the biological parent, perhaps the whole family, with the goal of supporting a safe return to their biological family.

In some cases the parent might have lost all their rights. I have had cases where there is an order of protection against the biological parent, so that the child won’t see their parent again until they are 18. In that scenario, I’m working with the foster parents with the goal of eventually finding an adoptive home for the child.

When children are no longer allowed to see their biological parents, that can be another form of trauma for the child, to be treated in therapy. Children who have been removed from their parents often love and miss their families, even if there has been terrible abuse.

MJ: Really? Even though the parents abused them so severely that they lost all their rights?

DL: Yes, and that’s actually common, even in situations where the child was horrifically abused by their family members, they will still want to be with them and protect them. Abuse is not simple, it is very complex, and can be extremely confusing for children and adults alike.

MJ: For you psychologically, does it get … depressing? I ask because one of the other photographers in the book is a combat/conflict photographer, and I know from my own work that there are certain projects I’ve done, death row or covering the ground zero after the World Trade Center attacks, there are times when it’s tough to leave the job at work.

You aren’t working like a typical therapist in private practice who is dealing with clients who are mildly neurotic or have a fear of flying. You are dealing with children who have really suffered. What does that mean to your daily life? How much do you take home?

DL: It’s funny because I’ve been thinking about that as we’ve been talking.

I have a colleague who recently said, “We don’t do re-search, we do me-search.” I think that’s pretty brilliant. I think that all of us—even if we don’t realize it—our motivation, or our investigating what we are curious about, comes from a place that we need to explore for ourselves.

This work helps me to understand myself better. One of the great things about being a therapist is that your own journey to self-awareness is a critical part of the work. If you are sitting with a client, and you don’t do the self-exploration work, it can be really detrimental, even dangerous, for your client because you might be projecting your own thoughts, ideas, or insecurities into the room, which is not helpful.
But as far as how much of it I take home, there are a few pieces to this. As much as I do hear traumatic stories, I also get to see remarkable instances of human resilience. It can be incredible. Sometimes I hear the stories or I read the case before I meet the people and it will be horrific. Then I meet the family and they are nice, normal people that had something terrible happen in their lives. They are so much more than just “the horrible thing” that happened in their life. Kids still play, kids move on, and there is so much strength there. It can be amazing to see.

On the other hand, within trauma therapy there is something called “vicarious trauma” or “secondary trauma” which, through constant exposure to the trauma of others, can have an impact on one’s own life and cause the therapist to take on trauma symptoms. Burn-out and compassion fatigue are also common among trauma therapists. Taking care of yourself is critical to being able to do this work.

Everyone has different ways of self-care. For me, I see my friends and family, I make my own art, I try to have a life outside of therapy. I’m fortunate to work in a very supportive agency. My supervisor is awesome, and she really wants me to do well, because if I’m not doing well I’m not going to help my clients. I have worked in environments where I did experience vicarious trauma and it hinders your performance as a therapist. You can’t do the work when you are taking it home like that.

MJ: How do you begin? When clients come in do you just break out the finger paints? Do you have an office? Where does this all take place?

[MJ notes: The photos for this profile were shot after the interview which took place in another location.]

DL: [laughing] I have an office, but it’s more like a playroom, and no, I’d never pull out finger paints in the first session. But choosing which materials to use, especially in initial visits is an important factor. Art therapists use different art materials to support goals depending on the client’s needs. Some materials are more expressive and regressive, such as paints and clay. Other materials offer more containment and control, like pencils.

For kids, making art is often no problem, they’ll just dive right in with any materials I hand them. Some kids need more prompting than others. With teenagers I have materials that are more age appropriate. And sometimes, the work is all verbal until the child is ready to make art.

The sand table is one of the classic tools in child psychology

MJ: But for the parents, I would imagine there’s a certain amount of resistance—is it hard to break through to them?

DL: Sometimes. I will normalize to the parents that making art as an adult can feel weird, especially if you haven’t done it since you were a kid. I work with the parents on exploring how making art can benefit their relationship with their child. And depending on who I am working with, I might offer less threatening material like magazine collage. Working with a medium like collage often feels less exposing than a blank paper with markers.

MJ: Ah, that’s clever, because you can observe the images that they choose …

DL: And it’s fairly easy for someone to succeed at it, and make something that looks fairly accomplished without any training.

MJ: Have you ever thought about giving the kids a digital camera? We have a program in my department where our students teach photography to disadvantaged high school students and sometimes we get amazing images from them.

DL: That could be interesting … there was that film Born into Brothels …

MJ: There’s also a photographer named Wendy Ewald who has worked with kids and cameras in Appalachia and with indigenous people of Canada. I think of her work as more ethnographic, but the photographs are amazing because they document the child’s world and culture from the inside out.

But to get back to the point … It also occurs to me that I keep thinking that the parents are the ones who have been abusive, but you also have clients who have experienced other forms of trauma, like losing one of their parents or some other tragedy that the parent had nothing to do with so in that case I imagine that the parent is really on your side as a collaborator.

DL: Yes, and that’s actually true most of the time because, while many of the parents are participating because of a court mandate, they are, by and large, sincerely trying to work out their relationship with their child. For many parents, bringing a child to therapy can bring up feelings of inadequacy. I work with the parents to process what led to them being in therapy, support them in realizing their strengths and working through whatever challenges they may face.

MJ: And are there successes?

DL: Yes, there are! The process is slow so you learn to appreciate the small successes and the steps along the way, but yes, you do have successes. You have to be really patient.

There’s one little boy I’ve been working with for … over a year now. He’s six, and his life has been so chaotic. He hasn’t had one adult—no parent, no caseworker—who has stuck with him for any period of time.

He came in bouncing off the walls with a long history of abuse. So much anger. He was destructive and violent, and exhibited a lot of sexualized behavior. I started with him by just creating a space, an environment that was very safe and predictable. Kids with trauma need predictability because the world is unsafe for them, and they often present as hypervigilant because they feel that they could be under attack at any moment.

So, in that instance I created a space and a routine that were very safe and very structured. I saw him twice a week and we’d start with, say, playing basketball, then move to drawing with crayons and markers, then a board game like Connect Four. The idea was to just make it the same routine every time he came in so he would know what to expect. Then, as he felt safer and safer, we could move off the routine.

Initially, that kind of containment was very difficult for him. The key is that even though he might rebel against the structure and routine, if I didn’t offer it he would get worse and get really out of control because he needed the structure in order to feel safe. At times he would try to hit me and kick me, and my response was just to be really firm, notice out loud what he was doing, and point out the consequences of his actions. Eventually, he learned that I wasn’t going to hit him or punish him with a physical response, which is what he had learned to expect from his past experiences with adults.

So it’s a slow process, but now he’s living with a foster mom who’s very nurturing and I’m seeing real progress. He’ll play with dolls and put a Band-Aid on them; he’ll have me or his foster mother hold the dolls while he feeds them. It’s an incredible change in his behavior, and very rewarding for me personally.

MJ: That’s amazing, just wonderful.

It occurs to me that when I started teaching and I was less experienced I often encountered problems with students that I was completely unprepared for. In fact, I still do. It’s just the nature of teaching art that you are often dealing with people’s feelings and emotions, so it can get a little raw sometimes. Having my colleagues, my original department chair in particular, as a resource and sounding board was invaluable, and I still feel the need to check in with him from time to time.

How does that work within your organization? Do you have regular meetings with your supervisor and the other staff?

DL: Yes, I meet with my supervisor once a week and we also have a clinical staff meeting with the whole team once a week.

MJ: And how many clients do you have?

DL: I see fifteen families a week.

MJ: Wow, that’s a lot!

DL: Actually, it feels about right to me. I think it’s a good number. At my old job I was seeing 40 clients a week, which was a little overwhelming. It can be a challenge to be as present as you need to be when you have too many clients.

MJ: What’s the career arc for your profession? What do you see yourself doing in ten years? Do you have any interest in private practice?

DL: I’m not sure. Private practice is an option, and there are some nice aspects to private practice: being able to create your own hours, being selective with who you see, that kind of thing.

But one of the most rewarding parts of what I do now is that all of my clients are people who wouldn’t be able to afford therapy otherwise. From a social justice point of view, that’s very important to me.

MJ: I think what I’m asking, in a very roundabout way, in a profession where the results are so intangible, how do you measure your success?

Is it for your six-year-old client to come back in ten years and tell you that he’s just been accepted to Harvard medical?

DL: [laughing] Well, yeah, that would be great!

I honestly love where I’m at right now. I’m supervising an intern from SVA, and that feels pretty great, kind of like I’ve come full circle and I’m giving back.

I honestly don’t know what the future holds. I enjoy supervising but I’ll also always want to be working directly with clients.

MJ: I’m curious, do you know who Henry Darger was? [Darger is one of the most famous and renowned “Outsider” artists. He was raised in an asylum, eventually escaped, and lived in obscurity, working as a hospital custodian until his death when his vast archive of paintings and writings were discovered.]

DL: Yes, I do.

MJ: I ask because I’m a huge fan of Darger’s and it seems to me that much of the appeal of the “Outsider” artists is the fact that their work is so pure and such a contrast to the art careerism that we see in most of the contemporary art we see.

So I wonder if some of that purity is present in the work of your clients … but I also wonder how your training affects the way you see art? When you look at someone … Darger for example, are you tempted to analyze it?

DL: Well, yes, but as a professional you have to be careful with that: I might see that a client’s artwork has symbols or indicators of sexual abuse for instance, when there is no history of sexual abuse in their case file. I can’t jump to a conclusion based only on their art.

MJ: What kinds of things would indicate that?

DL: With kids that have been sexually abused, you might observe that their developmental level in the art is younger than their chronological age. Often times children with sexual abuse will draw elements that are highly sexualized, for example a stick figure with genitalia, or child-like figures with sexualized features. But that alone wouldn’t be enough to draw a conclusion, I just have to note it and have my radar up for other indicators. It can be very easy to make assumptions based on a client’s art, and this is critical to avoid. The artist knows their artwork best.

MJ: And what about when you walk around a museum and look at art? Do you find yourself looking for indicators in the work of professional artists?

DL: Yes and no. If I look at Francis Bacon, for example, I think it’s probably pretty clear, even to a layman, that there’s something going on there emotionally.

But you can’t make generalizations. Just because someone makes art that is really meticulous and detail oriented, you can’t jump to the conclusion that they are obsessive compulsive.

My job isn’t to psychoanalyze the art, and that might be one of the least understood aspects of my job. An art therapist might be trained to look at art using a clinical lens: to see patterns, to see psychiatric symptoms that might be evidenced in a client’s art. But ultimately the artist is the expert on the art. The therapist is there to be a witness. We can never know others as well as they know themselves.