School Closings

Weather forecasters tell us we are about to get hit with our third snow event in five days.  The one this past Sunday made for some tricky driving, but was cleared quickly, and I drove home through light snow on Tuesday, but it never really accumulated.  On the other hand, tomorrow we may get our biggest snow of the season, and the school I teach at tomorrow night went ahead and cancelled all Thursday classes by this afternoon.  If it's as bad as they are saying, they would have to.  After I saw the message on the school's home page, I checked e-mail to get more details.  During the week we get e-mails with links to education related stories, some of which are interesting.  Today I clicked on one about a school I was familiar with.  It was officially announced yesterday that Sweet Briar College is closing at the end of the academic year.

Sweet Briar occupies a nice piece of the rolling hills not far from Lynchburg, Virginia.  It's an all girls school in a nice rural setting, and I got to spend a few weeks there back in the late 90's.  For decades the school has leased a chunk of property to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an artist colony.  It occupies a former farm, and what had been the original main farm building (and some small outlying adjacent buildings) has been divided up into individual studios, designed for visual artists, writers, and composers/musicians.  A few years before I was there the original residence building had burned down, but had been replaced with a modern building that looked like a cross between a dorm and a ski lodge.  Each fellow (as we were called) had a single room with a bed, desk, shelves with reading material, drawers and closet for clothes, and a bathroom shared with the room next door.  Breakfast and dinner were served in a dining room, buffet style with everyone sitting at round dining tables that could hold 6 or 8 people.  Lunches were box lunches, left at central pick up points by the studios during the morning.  My typical routine was to get up in time for breakfast, then walk down the road to the studio, and be there until late afternoon.  Then back to the residence to relax and hang out in the lounge area before dinner.  After dinner there was always some kind of presentation- a play reading, musical performance, etc.  Sometimes I'd go back to my studio afterwards for a few more hours.  The satellite dish was broken, so no television.

I had no plans to seek out such a place, but I had seen an ad for fully financed fellowships for New Jersey artists, supported by the Dodge Foundation, applied, and somehow ended up as one of the dozen to receive one.  Probably the relative rarity of woodcutting helping me out again.  I was offered a free five week stay, but just took half of that.  All in all, I had a great time.  Some of the fellows insisted on quiet privacy while at work, but I'm a printmaker, and used to having lots of people around me, so I had told everyone to feel free to knock on my door if you see my studio lights on, and many took me up on the offer.  But even those who hid in their studios were mostly friendly people back at the residence and the interaction made me realize how much I missed the Glove Factory of my Carbondale years.

One of the side benefits of being at the VCCA was that we had access to the Sweet Briar campus, just across the highway.  In nicer weather it would have been walkable, but being February I took my truck.  I still have my pink plastic library card, which I used to check out things while there.  My visits to the campus backed up a lot of what I read today.  Not particularly academically rigorous, it was a small school for rich southern girls in the middle of nowhere.  The few students I saw were usually dressed nicer than students I went to school with or teach now (often wearing pearls to class) and the one part of campus we were told we couldn't use was the horse stables.  At the time I calculated that the college  had only something like 10 or 15 students per building on campus.  The article I saw today said it was the numbers that did them in.  Enrollment is far to low to maintain the campus, few college students these days are seeking single sex education, and those who can afford the high tuition can probably afford better places.  After I read the article, I went to the VCCA website to see how this would affect them.  Having just learned this themselves, they don't know.  I guess it will depend on what is decided about the college property in general.  It's not on the main campus, so maybe it could be split off, but I'm sure there will be many legal issues to settle with the college before anyone worries about the artist program.  As much as I enjoyed it, I had no plans to return.  I have a Studio and plenty of interaction with artists in New Jersey.  Still, the fact that it may end is little sad.