As UArts closure shows, it can be tough to master the art of being an art school

Becoming an artist isn’t a straight line.

For me, it wasn’t even a single art school. It was a single city.

Until this spring, Philadelphia offered, and I have, over the years, attended, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia College of Art (as the University of the Arts was known for much of its life), Moore College of Art, and the Fleisher Art Memorial.

Now, one of them — PAFA — finds itself on precarious financial footing, and another — UArts, the former PCA — announced last week that it would be closing Friday.

Like so many others in Philadelphia’s arts community, I ache over the challenges these institutions face. But, mostly, I feel for the students who will not have the benefit of the life-changing programs now on the chopping block, and for their teachers whose dedication animated those programs. I can’t help but reflect on the vital role so many of their predecessors played in my own artistic growth.

My extensive sampling of Philadelphia’s art schools began in my suburban high school, when our “art” project was to cut out flowers in magazines, tape them down in an “arrangement,” and then trace them onto a surface we could then paint. Voilà! Art.

Not amused, my mother enrolled me at Moore College of Art Saturday classes for high schoolers. We used real art materials on real easels. No clipping and tracing. My eyes were opened to a new world of real art (and being able to hit Sansom Street on the way back to the train). Recently, I’ve hired three terrific Moore grads to help organize an archive of my drawings and cartoons.

Returning from my art-desert college, I got back into art at Philadelphia College of Art evening classes. I still have an egg tempera painting from a magical class taught by John Grauer. Now, decades later, a PCA grad and great designer helps me untangle my fraught relations with Photoshop when preparing cartoons for print.

After PCA, I enrolled part-time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where teachers followed in the footsteps of artists like Thomas Eakins and Cecilia Beaux.

Instructors, themselves practicing artists, helped me learn to really look at what I wanted to draw and paint. Robert Beverly Hale, the late artist and art curator, who was nearly 80 at the time, would train down from New York City to teach anatomy by quoting Leadbelly and drawing with a long stick topped with charcoal to impress on us that being able to render a hand — that supple, always in motion appendage at the end of our arms — can express as much as a face.

My interest in graphic art bloomed in PAFA’s lithography and etching classes, then located in a building on Chestnut Street. PAFA did not, thankfully, have a cartooning department, but the basics PAFA taught are applicable to all sorts of art and design. My etchings began to express my political opinions, one winning a nod at the annual student show.

In the last few years, I’ve been taking classes at the Fleisher Art Memorial, which is not a degree-granting institution but offers classes in everything from oil painting to ceramics to jewelry and photography. Classes are taught by working artists including PAFA, PCA, and UArts grads.

Their children’s programs have produced artists like Allan Edmunds, who went on to found South Broad Street’s Brandywine Workshop, and Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, who cofounded the hip-hop group The Roots. Their remarks at Fleisher’s fundraising dinner last fall were brimming with love and gratitude for how Fleisher opened their eyes to the wider world of art.

Fleisher continues to be a community treasure where many PCA, PAFA, and UArts alumni teach. Drexel’s Westphal College of Media Arts and Design and Temple’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture offer really good art programs. And Moore is thriving — according to the college’s president, Cathy Young, this is the school’s 23rd year running an operating budget surplus, their applications rose 12% over last year, and 97% of their students find employment within a year of graduation.

Perhaps it’s time to send the leadership of PAFA and UArts to one of Philadelphia’s really good business schools.

Signe Wilkinson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, spent 35 years as an editorial cartoonist at The Inquirer and the Daily News. She will speak on June 11 at 6 p.m. at the opening of the Pennsylvania Historical Society’s exhibit “Cartoons as Political Speech in Colonial America,” which includes some of her cartoons.