Flames shot out of the top of the gas-fired kiln as Marc Leuthold, an associate professor of art and a UUP member at SUNY Potsdam, led his students step-by-step through its safe operation. Along with instructions on setting the proper temperature, Leuthold reminded his class that many ceramics students in other fine arts programs never master this particular piece of equipment.
“What I’m trying to do is give you the skills and the information to be totally independent,” Leuthold told the attentive class. “If you’re continuing in ceramics and you are firing your own work, you’re going to need this.”
Throughout the SUNY system, you can find artists and performers whose work is acclaimed and whose reputations are established. They are dancers and musicians, directors and performance artists, painters and sculptors, writers and photographers. Yet they have chosen to share their hard-earned knowledge with students, saying the experience is given back many times over in seeing a future generation of artists preparing to carry on the tradition.
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UUP member Marc Leuthold, second from right, explains the techniques used with a gas-fired kiln to students in his ceramics arts class at SUNY Potsdam. |
Public university; public mission
Many of these arts faculty are acclaimed masters in their fields. Many of them could be teaching anywhere they choose.
Why, then, have they chosen SUNY?
Conversations with a half-dozen arts faculty in three UUP chapters around the state provide many responses to that question, with all of them addressing a common theme: the satisfaction of working with a diverse student body, in a public university setting that dovetails well with the public mission of their art.
So it has been for UUP member Randy Kaplan, an associate professor in the School of Performing Arts at SUNY Geneseo, and founder and director of GENseng — an Asian-American performance ensemble of students, and the only one of its kind in the SUNY system. GENseng is known for casting based on the performer’s ability, without regard for race or ethnicity and without makeup to artificially match the skin tone or features originally written into the character’s role. So a GENseng audience could see an Asian-American man playing King Lear, or an African-American woman playing a role originally written for an Asian actress.
Like many of her arts colleagues throughout the SUNY system, Kaplan has seen her students go on to rewarding careers — sometimes in the arts, sometimes in other professions, but always, she says, benefiting from their time at Geneseo.
“I just love my students,” Kaplan said in a recent interview. “I know their GENseng experience at Geneseo has been instrumental in their success in other fields.”
UUP member Anneliese Weibel of SUNY Geneseo uses the piano in her office to make a point about music theory to student Joseph Irizarry. Weibel is an assistant professor of music theory
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A cooperative approach
Kaplan lauds the help she gets from other arts faculty, who are ready to assist the student production staff with lighting, set design and sound for the GENseng performances. Among the colleagues who have lent their expertise is Anneliese Weibel, an assistant professor of music theory and composition at Geneseo who has written music for GENseng productions.
“We seem to be a really good pair,” Weibel said of her collaboration with Kaplan.
And, like Kaplan, Weibel said the interaction with students is beneficial to the creative process.
“I think I’m a teacher above anything else,” she said. “I like teaching; that comes easy for me. That, for me, is fun. Composing is hard; it’s work. Maybe because of the teaching, it becomes a two-way exchange, and the teaching energizes me for the composing.”
That energizing can last an entire career, as Jim Petercsak of SUNY Potsdam’s
Crane School of Music will attest. Petercsak joined the Potsdam faculty in 1968, and plans to continue teaching for as long as possible. A soft-spoken and modest man, his welcoming but quiet demeanor belies the breadth of his career as a nationally recognized percussionist and his recognition by SUNY as a distinguished teaching professor of music. He prefers to talk about his students.
“You have to have personal instruction in the arts,” Petercsak said. “They have to be motivated, they have to be inspired and they have to be instructed. Our kids get into this building at 8 o’clock in the morning, and most of them are here until 10, 11 o’clock at night. They’re very dedicated, and so are the faculty. They’re always in the building, coaching students.”
Petercsak is on the alumni board of directors at his own alma mater, the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. Like many of his colleagues in the arts at SUNY, he cultivates strong professional liaisons in his field, both to keep current as a performer and to develop a network for students.
“I like that contact because it keeps me in New York City, with the highest influences possible,” Petercsak said.
Training artists,and art appreciators
Professional artists and performers know how difficult it is to achieve success. SUNY arts faculty are also taking a look to the future, in recognition of the fact that the arts may end up being one facet in a well-balanced education rather than a full-time career for some students.
“Our goal, really, in the theater and dance major, is to give students experiences in technical training so that they can perform — to really develop their theoretical knowledge,” explained Robin Collen, an associate professor of theatre and dance who also chairs the department at Potsdam. Lithe and athletic-looking, she unconsciously struck a dancer’s pose that speaks to a lifetime of training, even while sitting casually in her office talking about the goal of making the arts relevant to students and parents.
“We recently had a roundtable discussion where we had faculty and alumni talk about what we did with our degrees in dance,” Collen explained. “The more you can do, the more you can get hired in this field. So it can be, ‘Oh, you do lights? And, you dance, too?’”
At the same time, Collen and her colleagues recognize that “a lot of parents are concerned about ‘What is my son or daughter going to do with a theater degree?’” In response to that question, the department is starting to focus more on the education aspect of a performing arts degree, with the goal of training students to become future teachers of music, theater and dance.
Mentoring as well as teaching
Arts faculty draw on their own entry into their field in working with students. Lenora Champagne, a performance artist and associate professor at SUNY Purchase, didn’t take a direct path into her present career as a performer, playwright and director. She was initially drawn more toward English literature and fine arts, and even had a brief stint in magazines before earning her Ph.D. in performance art at New York University. She broke into performance art in the early 1980s, at a time when women were just entering the field, and the early relationships she forged as a fledgling artist made a lasting impression on her.
She tries to give back that kind of help to her students, on the theory that what goes around, comes around. “I have to say, timing is a lot,” Champagne said. “I knew a lot of people in the field. The thing that I do tell my students is that, in addition to focusing on your work and tackling every opportunity as though it’s the only one you’ll ever have, is to support the people in your community.
“You can have all the talent in the world, but you have to find a door to open for you, and
that’s what I have tried to do.”
That could be the motto for the arts faculty at SUNY: Give back what your art has given to you.
— Darryl McGrath