On
the third floor of the Kendall building in downtown Grand Rapids
sits a room that is an amalgam of museum, workshop and construction
site. The concrete floor is covered in paint splatters and old
tape. Small sections of the huge room are partitioned off with
moveable wooden walls.
In this creative tenement works Mary Lynn Rouleau,
a Master of Fine Arts student focusing on painting and drawing.
Names, phone numbers, appointments and the quote “Myths
are simply forgotten religions,” are scribbled on the walls
around her. The single shelf in the room is cluttered with boxes
of coffee, popcorn, paintbrushes, paint, an anatomy book and various
jars filled with unrecognizable substances. On the table is a
purple plastic box and labeled “Girl’s Stuff”
in permanent marker and filled with tubes of paint. Charcoal drawings
are tacked up anywhere there is room.
Welcome
to an artist’s studio, one of many where Kendall College
of Art and Design students work toward earning their Master of
Fine Arts degree.
Rouleau
is currently working on a series featuring the everyday activities
of adolescent girls during their “blossoming period.”
The paintings show young girls sewing, flipping through magazines,
braiding each other’s hair and much more. Many of the paintings
depict Rouleau’s inspiration, her eighth-grade daughter
Marta.
“These paintings stress the everyday instead
of the angst most people associate with teenagers,” says
Rouleau. “I wanted to paint the tactile things—the
touching, the physical closeness of girls at that stage. Boys
roll around wrestling with each other on the floor, girls have
a whole couch but sit right next to each other.”
Rouleau
was teaching at Kendall on an adjunct basis when the Master of
Fine Arts program was introduced and was excited at the prospect
of earning her graduate degree at the college she loved.
“I was impressed by the quality of teachers
I experienced when I taught here part time. When the M.F.A. program
was introduced I was thrilled; I joined the first year,”
Rouleau says. Like mixing oil and pigment to create the perfect
paint, the graduate program at Kendall integrates traditional
and progressive approaches to the making of art. Students in the
M.F.A. program work toward the development of a cohesive body
of work, a strong knowledge of the philosophical foundation of
the arts, the conditions and expectations of the field and of
the advanced issues in art history. The M.F.A. degree prepares
students for careers in college-level teaching and other art-related
fields.
Artists in the master’s program can choose
to focus on painting, drawing, photography, printmaking or a dual
concentration in which a primary and secondary concentration is
selected. Both Rouleau and Cindi Ford are on dual concentration
tracks.
In the cubicle a few feet away from Rouleau
sits the petite Ford, whose area is cluttered with handmade wooden
boxes, painted white. She has been developing a multimedia piece
called “Life or Theater.”
“I was a sculpture major, became a print
maker and then decided to go to grad school and now I’m
taking a woodworking class,” says Ford. “So I’m
combining my skills.”
The piece consists of colorful woodcut people
placed in rooms designed to exaggerate real life, such as the
kitchen wallpapered in telephones. The tables in Ford’s
workspace are covered in these little people and the entire area
smells faintly sweet, like chai tea.
“I was influenced by memory for this piece.
I started thinking about how home life and interiors have changed.
Most of these figures are real people. I used images from when
my children were young and when they are older, I even brought
in my dog. So, it’s a mix of memory and imagination,”
says Ford. erris State University has long had the reputation
of being a technical, career-oriented school. In 2001, the merger
between Ferris and Kendall brought many programs to
Ferris,
including the M.F.A., that had a more creative component. Additionally,
B.A. programs were introduced that same year at the Big Rapids
campus.
In 2000, Noel-Levitz, a firm that specializes
in enrollment management solutions, suggested that certain programs
would make Ferris appealing to a wider range of students. It was
exactly what the College of Arts and Sciences faculty had been
waiting for.
“Noel-Levitz said that in order to bring
in more high-ability students, and to retain students who were
leaving Ferris in order to pursue traditional degrees such as
English or History at one of our sister institutions, we needed
to offer B.A. degrees, which are seen as a standard offerings
in any comprehensive university,” says Roxanne Cullen, interim
associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and head of
the Languages and Literature department.
A Bachelor of Arts degree, often called a Liberal
Arts degree, is generally considered to focus on such cultural
subjects as languages, history, geography and religion among others.
Many people thought that type of program contradicted Ferris’
commitment to technical and career-oriented education.
“Some people were concerned that B.A.
degrees were contrary to the Ferris mission; however, we need
to keep in mind that ‘career-oriented’ does not have
to be limiting. B.A.s often go on to graduate and professional
schools; they are people who have problem-solving abilities coupled
with verbal and written language skills, which are qualities employers
are seeking,” says Cullen. “The B.A. and the B.S.
do not have to be in competition with one another. They complement
and round out curricular offerings. The skills that a B.A. grad
has are life-long career skills, the kinds of skills that take
a person beyond the entry-level position.”
The easy part of developing the B.A. was that
the majority of the courses already existed in the curriculum.
For the faculty, it was a matter of grouping existing courses,
adding a few here and there, to create majors in English, History,
Sociology, Biology, Mathematics and Communication. This past year
Chemistry and Biochemistry were added to the list.
“We already had a faculty that could rival
that of any liberal arts college,” says Cullen. “And
at Ferris, students actually get to work with that faculty, rather
than taking courses with graduate students who are just learning
to teach. Our faculty is tremendous. More than 60 percent of the
Distinguished Teacher Award recipients have come from the College
of Arts and Sciences.”
Rouleau
is putting the finishing touches on one of her paintings, explaining
her work and the M.F.A. program even as she adds brush strokes
to the two richly textured figures on her canvas. When asked what
she thinks about the reputation Ferris and Kendall have for being
career-oriented, Rouleau says that you have to learn a little
of everything to be good at anything. “You have to have
some knowledge of composition or you create lousy furniture and
ugly cars.”
Which is a sentiment that brings to mind Einstein’s
famous saying about imagination being more important than knowledge.
Fortunately, Rouleau is in a program that lets her pursue both.
