A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
“Hope is the thing with feathers” — Emily Dickinson
“Keep hope alive” — Jesse Jackson
Uncertainty. That’s what I knew I was in for without question on this residency. It’s been a busy year. It hasn’t been roses since the last residency. There were tons of assignments and enough creative charge in me for making art and writing a poem a day on my Instagram, but again, I’m tired. I’ve shown work in galleries and been to art talks, shows, in addition to making art of my own, working with the Mother Mercy cohort and my 9–5. I managed to muster up enough drive to eke out a poem a day on my Instagram feed. I’ve been on it. And I’m exhausted. A response paper to all the critical theory I’ve been assigned is due every other week. I’ve had meetings with my mentor over my work. I’m a full-fledged student. It’s a lot. To add insult to all this self-imposed injury, the school that I’m attending has undergone significant change — and not for the good.
New Hampshire Institute of the Arts had been acquired by the liberal arts school New England College right after my first residency. We’d been hoping for a smooth transition. The WE I refer to are myself, the faculty and all the other students I’d attended school with last residency — my NHIA family. Two key figures of the program, Lucinda Bliss and Moriah, director and executive administrator respectively, resigned in the summer, just as I was entering the program. Other key faculty members had been demoted. Everything and everyone has been shuffled around. I‘ve been fighting with the financial aid department — they owe me money. Emails with new extensions were being assigned and the old ones were being wiped away. Each student is assigned a mentor during the semester to guide their practice. Towards the end, my mentor revealed to me that there’d been a change in how mentors would be paid by the school. Instead of being considered consultants, they were now employees spurning a considerable tax reduction in how they are paid. As a result, several mentors left the program and students felt the brunt of it. My mentor said to me, “If an artist was doing this for the money, then this change doesn’t really make it worth doing.” The NHIA we knew was dissolving right before our eyes like Obama-era policy — and being effaced in an offensively Trumpian fashion.
I initially heard about this program from a teacher that I’d met in Spain. Tim Horvath, a learned scholar and prolific writer in his own right, had recommended the experiment to me after having seen my artwork and hearing my poetry. “I’m not trying to recruit you because I teach there. I think you’d really benefit from going this school.” I didn’t need much else to begin my investigation. I liked what I found and applied. This was before the higher powers of the school had begun spending money they didn’t have on things the school didn’t need. I wouldn’t know about the financial troubles the school was in or the protests the students had to keep it independent until way later, until it was too late.
There’d been resistance prior to my enrollment that I didn’t know about. In 2014, Southern New Hampshire University attempted a merger with NHIA. Apparently, whomever was in charge of spending NHIA’s money squandered it to the point that they needed saving to remain open. SNHU tried buying it some time ago and were met with protests from the student-body and all kinds of effigy in the form of petitions and online vitriol. The whole thing had been under siege unbenownst to me. Consequentially, the New England college merger was done quietly so as to not arouse any rebellion. And here we are.
Some of my fellow cohorts saw the tsunami coming early and were beginning to leave. My kindred! Both Jerome and Ishé decided to leave the program for their own reasons. I understood. Life happens. Also, there were other opportunities, better ones and more convenient. I was sad to see them go, but I am happy they’re in places conducive to their creativity and work-life balance. We continue to be in touch. That still leaves me. I’ve been taking this journey seriously. And oh yeah, am I going to be the only Black person now?!
In addition to my kindred’s decision not to return, four other artists had also decided to transfer to Lesley University in Boston. All of the ambiguity about the future of the program and lack of communication between new faculty and NHIA’s leaders had become the elephant in the studio, as it were.
Well, at least now, I know some folk in New Hampshire. It should be fine. There’d been a snowfall. Turns out, the great state of New Hampshire doesn’t require homeowners to shovel their sidewalks nor is the town of Manchester too big on getting big sheets of ice and snow off out of the way for pedestrians. So, my bright idea of walking to campus and back from my airBnB was an immediate wash upon arrival.
Laura, Ashleigh, Yaz and Michelle are all visual artists in their fourth residency. They’re almost out of here. Their friendship had been solidified before I knew this program existed. For all intents and purposes, they are the four I consider The Squad of NHIA. They pulled up on the first day clad in New Hampshire Institute of the Arts sweatshirts — wearable protest art lamenting the loss of the school we’d all applied to, the school we thought we’d be graduating from when we were all accepted. A fellow artist and comrade of theirs had made them the shirts ahead of the residency with the school’s logo on them. With all the work I’d been doing and how far away I am, I kept myself pretty distant from the reality of what was happening. Now, it was all I could see.
We’re a tight knit group. This was most certainly a takeover — a hostile one. Lars Jerlach was the new head honcho and day one started with his introduction. The auditorium could easily sit 100 people, but there were no more than 30 of us there, inclusive of faculty. In talks like these, teachers typically sit at the foot of the stage or on the ground level with us. Lars decidedly took his place behind the podium.
Ever see Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? There’s the scene where Willy Wonka, played by Johnny Depp, comes out to introduce himself and it’s just overdone and scary and awkward at the same time?
That’s what Lars on that stage behind that podium was like. We were all stuck like Charlie and his grandfather.
Later that night was the Art Talk with Lars. Time had been allocated to him separate from his introduction as the new Art Director for him to present his art to all of us. A lot of his art lives in the realm of installation. The work I can most clearly recall had to do with calling upon people to read excerpts from the script of Star Wars and playing back the recitations simultaneously on multiple screens in the gallery space. Usually, art makers take some kind of stand — either for the mainstream institution as it is or against it. From the work presented, Lars’ position was muddled. Fellow cohort Yaz asked, “…so are you against the establishment or are you sucking its dick?” to which he replied “a little bit of both”.
Okay.
Even with all that had transpired over the last semester: the messiness with the mentors, my financial aid office fight, our passes not working upon arrival at any of the school buildings, the fallout with other students leaving to attend other schools mid-semester, Lars’ shoddy introduction and art talk— it wasn’t until after the talk that I knew NHIA had truly come to its foreseeable end. It was then I knew that all hope was gone.
Shyla and I were heading out of the auditorium at the back entrance. Serendipity would have it that we would be leaving at the exact same time that Lars was. I held the door open for Shyla and just as I was to step out behind her, Lars scooted between the two of us, availing himself of the open door I’d held for my friend. He made no acknowledgment of either of us, there was no thank you for opening the door for him (against my will) and how he flounced off with an odd gait rife with entitlement into the parking lot, vanishing as quickly as he’d appeared, left us both flabbergasted. It was chilling. And telling. We were truly shocked at how invisible we were to him in that moment. It was a moment that would come to frame the remainder of our time during the residency.
The next day was the start of our crits. I was excited for all the eyes on my new work. I was ready to hear the good, the bad and the ugly about my art from the artists I respect and value. Brian was first.
Brian had been my advisor throughout the prior residency and was one of the architects of NHIA’s low residency visual arts program. He came to us right before our first crit to tell us this would be his last residency. It was turning into something else that he couldn’t put his weight behind and he wanted to give us the courtesy of letting us know upfront. It was a heart-to-heart that would be the prelude to a descent into a deluge of academic malfeasance that would soon wash over me and the rest of us in attendance.
The founders and architects of the low-residency program considered it to be a great experiment they’d constructed from the ground up some 14 years ago. All of us that applied wanted nothing more than to be a part of the artistic legacy they’d nurtured and now we were being made to watch the new regime scoot them all out with little explanation or courtesy to our leaders or direction from them as to what was next. It was Game of Thrones. The House of Lannister now prevailed in New Hampshire. Ned Stark was dead.
A shit show is what it’s being described as by many here this go round. I might have to agree. Aside from our faculty being pushed out with no nod to our displeasure or grave concerns, the logistics were bad. The campus wasn’t clean — after the weather conditions had left it icy. As a result, Ned, a photographer in his fourth residency, broke his hand on his way back to get a cup of coffee. I’m not sure if he slipped on ice on campus or not, but I do know that the schedule was so tight that he felt the need to rush to get back. On ice. To his credit, Ned was in pleasant spirits after this. I would’ve had a full-out tantrum. There were many tantrum-worthy moments during this residency, but I restrained myself. Some of my cohorts reacted in different ways to the madness we were being subjected to: Caitlin had abrasive outbursts. I ran away to my airbnb at EVERY given opportunity. Shyla incredulously fell into a vortex of denial wherein none of it was actually happening. She kept saying “everything is different, but nothing’s really changed”, but everything had changed. I could see it on our teachers’ faces. It had been expressed that Lars begrudgingly met with staff halfway through the residency and only to tell them that he was changing the structure of the program and that their contracts weren’t secure.
The MFA low-residency on the writing side arrived in the middle of the week. In residencies past, we started at the same time, in an effort to create community between the two disciplines. This had attracted me to the program when I applied initially. It never quite materialized the way I thought it would, but this time, the attempt wasn’t really made at all. The writers and the visual artists were pretty much segregated. I made an effort to link with the writers. I caught up with Tim! I expressed my sadness and displeasure to him around my experience and the current state of things. He said something mind-blowing like “so, then you’re going to move into the writing program then?” It had never even occurred to me! I had been accepted by NHIA’s writing program. Maybe this was the move I was supposed to make. I began plotting the getaway because whatever my future is, it certainly isn’t with NEC’s visual art MFA program.
It was bittersweet. I relished my time with the writers that were graduating — Flora and Christine. They too had had unpleasant experiences throughout the transition. They were happy that their ride was coming to an end. I attended a poetry reading at The Bookery that featured NEC’s MFA writing director Jennifer Militello. Tim introduced me to Jennifer and she was immediately welcoming and so graciously offered any and all assistance in seeing to my needs as a student. I am forever grateful for her spirit and concern. Anne-Marie, Trish, John and Mike Hull were all graduating too. What would usually be a time for celebration, had the stench of something else beneath it, something funky we could all smell. The zenith of our collective mourning came to a head during Mike’s talk. An attorney turned performance artist, Mike has this all-encompassing mid-Western personality that can galvanize and captivate anyone within earshot. His grad talk presentation sounded like a scene out of a Nora Ephron movie — one without a happy ending. He bemoaned how terrible everything had become among current faculty and the new regime — how emails inquiring as to next steps went without answer; how the climate had changed. He called the founders up to the stage — Craig, Amy, Lucinda and Moriah. It was then that Mike encouraged all who’d been impacted by these great minds to come and bid them farewell. It was like a funeral procession. Everyone was crying. Everyone except Lars who left graduation early without saying goodbye to any faculty or students.
It’s now been a month since my return. Craig and Amy were let go. Long emails were exchanged by and between all of us to Lars still searching for answers. We made appeals to the new dean, John Callahan, but he rebuffed all of us immediately. His response was something to the effect of “…this is it. You’re either coming with us or you’re not”. These were the white men I’d only seen on television. The commanders in A Handmaid’s Tale, the ones played by Billy Bob Thornton and Chris Cooper — the ones that only care about asserting their power and getting their way.
So now, I’m in the throes of application submissions to other schools with more fruitful possibilities in line with the creative path I envisioned for myself. I’m sad that this is the end, but I don’t have time to wallow. There’s much to be done. Onward.
