An appreciation: Nicholas Kripal, Temple prof who helped students 'come alive with excitement'
Nicholas Kripal always had a story at the ready, always a joke he was bursting to tell — but in Hester Stinnett's fondest memory of him, he didn't say a word at all.
They were visiting Stonehenge, of all places, with a busload of Temple University art students — Stinnett is the interim dean at the Tyler School of the Arts; Kripal, a longtime ceramics professor — on a study-abroad trip that Kripal had organized. He had managed to finagle a private visit to the towering prehistoric monument just before dusk. The art students were thrilled.
Stinnett watched him as he watched his students. He stood to the side, smiling as they took photos, made sketches and clambered around the standing stones.
“They were alive with excitement and wonder," Stinnett said. "And I looked at Nick, and I thought, ‘He, in his quiet way, made all of this happen.' He was always making things happen for our students.”
Kripal died Sept. 30 after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 63. The son of a gas station owner from Lodgepole, Neb. — pop. 318 — Kripal came to Philadelphia in the 1980s for a job at Tyler and never left. He bought a house on North 2nd Street and behind it cultivated an enormous garden. He adopted a dog, a mostly-mastiff mutt named Bella. He crafted enormous, imposing adobe sculptures and terra cotta pieces that could fit in your hand. He taught hundreds of students over 34 years as a professor, and only stopped teaching this spring, when he became too ill to continue.
“Some teachers are going to want you to produce an image of themselves,” said Eric Miller, who studied under Kripal as a graduate student and later worked for him at the school. “He was very good about getting you to make your own decisions and pushing you in directions you're not realizing. You didn't realize you were being nudged, but you were being nudged.”
Students looked forward to his oddball sense of humor in the classroom, and the armfuls of vegetables from his garden he would bring in for them.
"You could tell when he was excited to tell you a joke, because his eyes would twinkle — you could feel his energy," said Charity Thackston, a former graduate student. He would tell cheesy dad jokes and imitate Ed Sullivan — "We've got a really, really big show for you tonight." Once, he called her over to his desk, bursting to show her something. It turned out to be a salad-dressing ad that he could not stop laughing at.
Kripal never married and had no children, but cultivated a close circle of friends. He met his frequent collaborator, Jeffrey Mongrain, in an MFA program at Southern Illinois University in the late 1970s, and the two remained close for the next 40 years, holding shows around the world. Kripal designed his sculptures for cathedrals and “spiritual spaces,” Mongrain said. He was inspired by gothic architecture and religious stories, and the idea of creating something new for all those old places.
“I think it’s a little uncommon sometimes for men to have such close friends and to travel together and share so much,” Mongrain said. “I’ve been very fortunate.”
Rochelle Toner, a former Tyler dean, remembered Kripal's solstice parties, twice a year, with single-malt Scotch and vats of homemade soup at his house just around the corner from the Crane Arts Building, a former plumbing factory that Kripal used his retirement savings to buy. Tired of getting kicked out of rented studios when a new owner bought the building, Kripal and a few partners bought the factory in 2004, long before Girard Avenue became a hipster hotspot, and rented it to artists in the area at affordable rates.
"I can't think of another person who had exactly the qualities Nick had," Toner said. "And they all had really to do with appreciating the texture of life, in all ways — with art, friendship, cooking, gardening, teaching, serving the community. It sounds like it's made up. But that was Nick."