These artists practiced what they taught at CMU
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Art teachers are often the first to be cut when public schools face budget crises, as they do now in Pennsylvania. A new exhibition at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, "They Practice What They Teach: Artist Faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology," reveals the depth of that loss.
The exhibit collects work of 15 artists who taught at the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. The adjacent gallery of work by Hubert J. FitzGerald, who studied with many of these teachers, highlights their impact on students' growth as artists -- and a perusal of the exhibition quickly proves these teachers taught more than art.
Everett Warner's industrial cityscapes showing the green Monongahela River studded with light, smoke billowing from factories and mills, are a lesson in Pittsburgh history, as is William Charles Libby's "The Day Pittsburgh Was Born" (1958), commissioned for the bicentennial of the French and Indian War.
"They were here teaching, but they grew to love the surroundings, and painted them," curator Barbara Jones said.
The city's history is recorded in precise local detail in Clarence Carter's "Pittsburgh Hill District" (1940), Roy Hilton's "Steel Works in Winter" (not dated) and "The Miner" (1936), Norwood Hodge MacGilvary's "Pittsburgh" (1928), Samuel Rosenberg's "Job Lists" (1938) and Raymond Simboli's "Steel Mill" (1950) and "Pittsburgh Factory Scene" (c. 1945).
Robert Gwathmey's scenes of African-American life in the South provide stark Social Realist commentary, as does the visible shift in Mr. Rosenberg's work at the time of the Holocaust. Works like "Bread No. 1" (1942) a scene of anguished, emaciated figures painted by the Jewish artist during his "stained glass period," are intensely colored and stylized, marred by heavy black lines. Mr. MacGilvary's Surrealist "Here & Elsewhere," painted during World War II, shows a globe patched by fire in Europe and the Pacific.
Collected, these works show that art teachers also can teach politics, history, sociology and psychology.
"The public schools are really losing out, because art is, in these economic times, the first thing to get cut," Ms. Jones said. "These kids are missing out on how art can create change. It has a vital role in today's society and always has."
First Published July 31, 2011 12:00 am
