Making an Artist

By Calum Grieve

Every year, students and staff in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin live and breathe their art. They wake up to go to lectures, study art history, or make their own projects throughout the week.

The College of Fine Arts at the university has over 2,000 students and houses many programs, such as visual arts, musical arts, theater, dance and creative technologies. The college’s visual arts can be found in the Department of Art and Art History and the School of Design and Creative Technologies, the latter only having recently joined the College of Fine Arts, being founded in 2017.

Susan Rather, a professor of art history, was named chair of the Department of Art and Art History in 2020, after being interim chair for a year. Over the last four years, being chair has taught her to be flexible.

“I had no real preparation for being chair of this department,” Rather said. “I’d never supervised anybody, never managed budgets, or anything like that.”

Rather has seen the department through its ups and downs while handling COVID and learning the ropes of being chair. In the last two years, Rather has learned to be adaptable and be prepared for something unexpected to crop up at any time.

“It’s a constantly challenging job that requires the chair to be always on her toes,” Rather said, “always thinking, always trying to find ways to improve processes, to provide clarification about things that are unclear.”

Rather appreciates it though, because she likes having a job that interests her while also giving her a challenge

In addition to her duties as chair, Rather must also make herself available for her students. Kate Catterall, an associate professor of design who has been at UT for 20 years now, helping to build up the university’s design program, also often works with her students, and she loves it. Each year she meets new students with unique and ambitious ideas that help keep the program fresh and her job exciting every year.

“It keeps you young, it’s like eternal youth, you’re talking about new ideas all the time, with younger and younger people,” Catterall said.

Originally, Catterall worked as a practicing designer in the United Kingdom. However, after a short period as a professor, she realized loved working in design programs at universities.

“It’s like an extended period of graduate school, working with your colleagues and collaborating with them,” Catterall said, “you get to do all these fun projects, experiment with ideas, and question the future of your discipline, so lots of speculative work, which sometimes happens in practice, but less so.”

Professors are always busy with work, and often also keep their students busy as well. Cameron Wesley, a design student at the University of Texas at Austin, always has a project or assignment to be working on.

“I’d say a solid two hours a day,” Wesley said.

Wesley also has a few classes every day.

“Usually I’ll wake up around 11 or 12, hop on zoom, go through a lecture, and then around two to five I’ll usually have another studio course,” Wesley said. “And then I do have one in-person class at five to eight on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

Professors that teach these classes must spend time getting ready for the class. Catterall prepares her lectures for the week ahead and grades during the weekend.

“I will spend probably … about three hours a week prep once I have everything established,” Catterall said.

Additionally, Catterall has meetings with her department every Wednesday for three to five hours. Professors also have to go to conferences across the globe to make sure the university is present in many disciplines world wide. Post-pandemic, some are via zoom meetings, which helps to lighten her workload.

In a fine arts program, students expect to creatively express themselves while challenging themselves by using new techniques. They may be surprised that this isn’t always the case. Wesley thinks most of the time, they aren’t able to creatively express themselves properly because of the amount of creative freedom they are given.

“I think that sometimes the professors either give us … too little freedom to where we either don’t know what to do, or don’t give us enough freedom and we have to make something that we don’t really care about,” Wesley said.

Though they may not always succeed, the professors try to work unique ways to allow students to creatively express themselves. Catterall wants to make sure her projects encourage students to think both creatively and critically as much as possible.

“I am teaching a course on designing a souvenir for your hometown at the moment,” Catterall said.

The project is meant to create something special for students’ hometowns while also preventing their personal biases from getting in the way of making what their client wants. It is also structured in a way that forces them to take charge. They need to know what the project needs and guide the client along that process.

The creative input of a class can vary from teacher to teacher, depending on their preferred teaching style. Even students taking the exact same class as one of their peers may experience different styles of classes. Wesley works in studios for many of his classes, such as Objects and Spaces, which was the first class where he really learned to use most of the labs and spaces available to him.

“I would say that most of the classes are studio based, and they’re more just like projects,” Wesley said. “Every two, three weeks we’ll have a new project to be working towards that’ll be teaching us some type of skill.”

First year programs at the university, such as the First-Year Core Program in the Department of Art History, are designed to get every student on the same level of skill while also acting as a way for students to meet other students with similar interests to them. Outside of these programs and other basic classes, arts students continue to develop new skills every year. Art and design are both very volatile professions, with constantly changing demands and trends. Learning new things every year helps to prepare students to be flexible in the real world.

“I think there should be something new at every level in every course, even your senior course,” Catterall said.

At a university typically thought of for its status as a highly ranked research university, the fine arts department may feel out of place and like they are not as high of a priority to the university administrators as STEM programs are.

“I think that people in my department, or even my whole college, which is the College of Fine Arts … have been over many years … concerned that we are not as visible to top administrators or that what we do is not taken as seriously, as say, what an engineer, or a chemist, or let’s say people broadly in STEM fields do,” Rather said.

Some students have to purchase their own materials, unlike other fields, which typically get university supplied materials. Students also agree that it appears they might not be as visible, noticing that if their peers’ department has issues, they seem to be solved faster than their own department’s.

“If we have a problem, it’s definitely not solved as quickly as, say, like my girlfriend, she’s an engineer,” Wesley said. “They have everything they could need over there.”

UT prides itself on its engineering program, and might be more focused on it than on some others, such as the arts programs. Even with these visibility problems, UT arts students still have vast amounts of resources available to them. Rather believes that the faculty, who can give guidance to their students, are the one of the most important resources for students.

“The faculty is a resource, the students have each other as resources, and all kinds of organizations,” Rather said.

Faculty can help students with projects or papers, as well as advise students as they write their thesis if they are in a postgraduate program. In addition to UT’s standard libraries, students have access to the Fine Arts Library, which contains collections of resources on various branches of fine arts.

“They have incredible libraries and digital resources for databases and whatnot,” Catterall said.

Design students have access to the art building for art supplies. They can also use Anna Hiss Gym for better tools and machines than they have in their own shops, but it isn’t as easily accessible.

“We have a wood shop, we have a design lab which houses art supplies for the most part, cutting boards, a lot of print and letter press stuff,” Wesley said.

These shops are readily available for students to work in during the day. Also available to design students are fabrication labs, with 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC cutters, another form of precise cutting machines.

When you boil it down to its basics, university students are learning skills that they will need for the rest of their lives. Catterall wants

Sources: University of Texas at Austin, Drawing the Ring of Steel to take it a step further, using her classes to teach her students design philosophy that applies also to life.

“What you can do is pick and choose from a variety of methods that you come across in your lifes,” Catterall said. “But there’s no one right way.”