New England’s Big and Small Art Schools Reflect Country

Students Plan for Different Art Years at RISD and Lyme Academy
 

PROVIDENCE, RI—On a stretch of New England coastline, two very different kinds of art colleges are preparing for the new school year. To the north is the very large Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and 60 miles down the rural freeway is the very small Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

            They are like the bookends of American art schools.
            Founded in the 1877, RISD today is a behemoth of art education with 2,400 students and a long tradition of commercial design. Having expanded to about 40 buildings, the school seems to blanket the riverside edge of College Hill, named for Brown University, which stands higher on the slope.
            By comparison, Lyme Academy in rural Connecticut is a newcomer. It was founded in 1976 to provide classic art training, since, as it says, “representational art and the traditional education of artists were disappearing in the Western world.” With its small enrollment—85 students—Lyme is unapologetic about its four-year college regimen of drawing, painting, and sculpting from nature and the human form.
            To fulfill this mission, Lyme does not need a large campus. Once you turn off the freeway, it’s a few blocks through the woods to a small complex of one-story buildings poised on a circular driveway. Although Lyme’s college degree requires a segment of liberal arts courses, the campus is designed to serve one purpose: to house studios with a practice-makes-perfect approach to drawing and painting.
            RISD also began small, but no more. Back in the 1960s, recalls one 1963 graduate, it was  a few brick buildings on its steep hill. Next door, the school was overshadowed by a white New England church with a tall steeple: the first Baptist church in America, founded by the Puritan “free thinker” Roger Williams. Fifty years ago, in other words, even RISD was small enough to be a congregation of sorts. “I loved the up and down [of the hills] and dramatic vistas,” says the 1963 graduate, a native of flat Louisiana. “When Providence was snowed in we’d come shooting down those hills on cafeteria trays.”
            In the years since then, RISD has expanded, edging across the river-side promenade and mingling with the urban district. This year, RISD and the city have received a National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant of $200,000 to revitalize a downtown travel hub that’s seen better days. The effort is being called “creative placemaking”: drawing the public downtown to enjoy the arts. To fulfill its role, RISD has created a studio course from which students can spring to action.
            The school’s bid for urban renewal has not subtracted from its more jazzy reputation. Over this summer, the RISD Museum of Art showcased “Cocktail Culture,” a look at 60 years of glitzy fashion. On entering the exhibit, visitors were greeted by a large group photo of RISD’s fashionista students. Dressed to the hilt, they greet visitors with that studied magazine fashion look (no smiles).
            The RISD museum has become a magnet of art donations over the decades. Gift after gift, it has built up the tenth largest private museum collection in the country. It features Impressionists, American realists, Cubists, and Pop artists, but also harks back millennia to Persian mosaics. With 86,000 objects, the museum is a boon for art history students at RISD and at Brown University as well. The two schools share many courses, a co-op that is rare in U.S. higher education today.
            Fifty years ago at RISD, “The whole thing had a ‘family’ feel and seemed very manageable,” says the 1963 graduate. The college is now a high-stakes art institution with record costs, ambitious career goals, and seasoned faculty unions. RISD also is defining art as a digital-age vocation.
            Down the road at Lyme Academy, a family model still prevails. It follows the “atelier” tradition (a studio with a master-teacher). With its classical specialty, Lyme has enough clientele to pay the bills and endure. Naturally, its tuition and number of available courses are lower than at RISD ($25,248 compared to $39,482, not counting lodging). However, they both deliver the same degree, a bachelors of fine arts.
            For every large art college in America, usually there is a smaller academy in the region, typically on the atelier model. That model is rare at today's full-service art colleges, with the 330-student Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts being one exception. Otherwise, if there is an “atelier movement” afoot, its best examples continue in New York City, where traditional art methods hold sway at the New York Academy of Art, the Art Students League, the New York Studio School, and Grand Central Academy of Art.
            What makes Lyme unique is its status as an undergraduate, degree-granting college combined with the atelier spirit. What RISD has is everything else: size and scope and a strong urban presence. It is a nice contrast at either end of that 60-mile costal drive of New England.