12.18.04
CHANGING
THE FACE OF HALIFAX ART A week after teaching his final class and just days before cleaning out his office, retiring Nova Scotia College of Art and Design professor Garry Neill Kennedy is still working, busy marking student art projects. When he began his 23-year tenure as president of the school in 1967, one of the first things he did was eliminate grades in studio classes, exchanging GPAs for a pass-fail system. After he left the president's office in 1990, the school slowly brought them back. So Kennedy makes his own small protest by giving high marks. "It doesn't make sense to judge art by letter grades," Kennedy says. "When you're making art, the competition comes from somewhere else, not from grade terrorism." Grades weren't the only thing he changed when he took over the school. He began moulding and shaping what was then the Nova Scotia College of Art almost immediately. "I thought the school had an interesting history, embedded in its roots," he says, "but it was in need of a push. "The war was on in Vietnam, and even though times were tragic; there was still hope and the distinct feeling that anything was possible." To give the school the push he thought it needed, Kennedy hired professional artists as permanent faculty, established the first degree programs at any Canadian art college, started the NSCAD Press, invited international artists to participate in the school's lithography workshop and established galleries to show the work of students and visiting artists. The galleries, he says, played a vital role in establishing the school within the community. "There was no Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, there were no university galleries to speak of and the NSCAD art gallery barely existed - the very strong institutions we have today didn't exist," says Kennedy. "The public, in my view, was missing some of the action." Kennedy opened the Anna Leonowens Gallery in 1968. Earlier this month, the gallery had its 3,000th exhibition. "There were no commercial galleries in Halifax that exhibited contemporary art," says Alvin Comiter, chairman of the school's media arts division, who started teaching at NSCAD in 1974. "So he was bringing a very avant-garde vision of art not only to a fairly conservative school, but a conservative community in general." If new galleries heightened NSCAD's profile within Halifax, the NSCAD Press did the same thing abroad. Kennedy opened the press in 1972 to publish works by and about prominent contemporary artists. It released 26 books before shutting down 15 years later. "The press was very important for those of us overseas," says Paul Greenhalgh, the current NSCAD University president, who first heard about the school while studying art in England. "I remember as a student myself seeing a book about Claes Oldenburg from the NSCAD Press and thinking, 'God, that must be a great place.' " The press returned in 2002, soon after Greenhalgh took over. But the moment many think was the turning point in the school's history is an art conference Kennedy and the school staged in 1970. The conference brought in artists such as Iain Baxter, Joseph Beuys and Robert Morris to Halifax to lecture about art. "Of the important artists at that time, if you could name them, they were probably here," Kennedy says, adding that it was then that he realized the school had international appeal. "There was a moment in the conference where I thought, 'Wow, it looks like we've got something here.' " Kennedy is quick to point out that the conference didn't happen in isolation but was the result of changes already occurring. Perhaps the biggest of those was the sort of art students and faculty started to produce. "The whole modernist period had barely phased the school at that time," Kennedy says. But in the late '60s and into the '70s, Kennedy says, modern conceptual art finally made its way to NSCAD. "A lot of NSCAD's reputation was built on very innovative programs on conceptual art, which was the field that Garry himself was working in at the time," says Comiter. The other accomplishment Kennedy points to is moving the campus from Coburg Road, beside Dalhousie University, to its current home downtown in the Historic Properties. "Setting up the downtown campus was key, because it ensured us that we would stay independent of Dalhousie," says Kennedy. "These buildings are so great. The spaces are warm, forgiving and flexible. The great art schools are in the core." Kennedy says if it weren't for NSCAD's move, many of those buildings would have been destroyed. "His vision in having the college being located in the core of the city," says Comiter, "really saved a huge portion of the waterfront at a time when the city was not paying very much attention to historic preservation." Kennedy stepped down as president in 1990, but has taught various courses in painting and printed media ever since. Now that he's leaving, he hopes the school stays the course he had a large hand in charting. "I hope it goes the same way without missing a beat," he says. Kennedy's presidency, says Greenhalgh, was a particular age, "and we're not simply reconstructing that age, but we're seeking to repeat its successes," says. "But we have no intention of letting him go too far. It's not really going to be a dramatic break, I don't think." Looking ahead, Kennedy, 69, plans to focus on making art. In October, he opened An Eye for an Eye at Museum London in London, Ontario. The piece has the words "eye," "for" and "eye" painted in large letters on three adjacent walls. Sixty circular Ikea rugs of different colours are on the floor. He says the piece comments on "tragedies in the Middle East," as well as the exchange between viewers and the museum. He has shows scheduled in New York in June and Toronto in September. And he says the $15,000 from the Governor General's Award he won in the spring will keep him going. "Will I miss teaching? Sure I will, but I have lots
to do," he says. "That's one of the things about artists:
you never really retire." |