December 11, 2011
by email
Good evening Principal Woolf.
My name is Alban Goddard Hill.
I live in Belleville, just to the west of Kingston.
I have been a General Practitioner here
for 30 years.
I am a graduate of Queen's University School
of Medicine, 1978.
I have ...
My purpose in contacting you is to discuss
the School of Fine Arts,
but first I would like to congratulate
you on your appointment as Principal,
and to thank you for taking on the job!
I am very disappointed with your announcement
that the School of Fine Arts
will no longer accept new students.
With respect, I think that you are on the
wrong track here.
I regard the Arts Faculty as the central
faculty at the university,
with all of the others in a supporting
role,
and at the centre of the Arts Faculty,
the Fine Arts School.
I simply want to ask you what I can do
to help you
to get that very important program back on track.
I would be grateful if you would call me
at your convenience.
I am not a visual artist, but I would be
pleased to
(a) make you a colourful shirt,
(if you will forgive me for saying so,
the white one in your website photo is
a little dull),
(b) bring along one of my choirs to sing
you a piece of your choice,
(I hope you heard the Bach Christmas Oratorio
at the Kingston Gospel Temple
today)
(c) take you out in my sailboat to show
you
the stunning colour and light effects
of Eastern Lake Ontario skyscapes in the
autumn,
(d) bring along a half dozen paintings
from my office and home walls
to try to explain what they have done for
me in the past thirty years,
and what they no doubt will continue to
do.
or (e) all of the above,
or anything else that would help you
to sustain the Fine Arts Program
at the very famous Queen's University at
Kingston.
Best wishes,
Alban
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Russell Smith: On Culture
Why the decline of art schools hurts more than
just artists
.......At Queen’s, the fine art department was small but visible and necessary.
No one was as desirable as the pale, shaking girls who would emerge from their fumes and light more fumes in the snow, who
would go to parties in diaphanous skirts and long johns and army boots. Without them, that sweatshirted, healthy campus would
have been an aesthetic desert. Everyone benefited from seeing their shows, too: I remember standing in front of an abstract
canvas talking to a history major about deconstruction, because of that canvas’s title. The ideas even in the most annoying
kind of art – the stack-of-pennies art – are the same ideas that inform everybody else’s life, they are
the ideas that every cultured person and media consumer has to talk about. The white-walled galleries were for all of us.
Queen’s University has stopped accepting new students into its BFA program, due
to a lack of resources. (I can hear you guffawing at the idea that Queen’s has a lack of resources: Obviously what they
mean is that they don’t think it’s important.) Queen’s hasn’t announced closure of the program yet
(they are going to “re-assess” it) but I suspect it won’t last long......
**********************************
February 10, 2012
Return call, from Judith Brown, Associate Vice-Principal (Advancement):
From Ms. Brown and other sources one's impression is that:
At Queen's University each Faculty is independently funded, so that in the
absence of equalization payments within the federation the supporting faculties are all prospering while the central
faculty, the jewel in the Queen's crown, the Faculty of Arts, is in decline from attrition, professors unreplaced
as they retire. The department of Fine Arts is but one example.
It is disappointing that Queen's University is unable to show
leadership in support of the fine arts, and that the continued employment of one half time Fine Arts professor represents
such a challenge. In the absence of such leadership secondary schools no longer include art or music in their curricula
either. Apple rules, and we are all the poorer for it.
In her history of Queen's University entitled And Not to Yield, Neatby underlines
one of the school's mottos from Tennyson which is "to strive, to seek, to find, and Not to Yield". However in the matter of
the continued viability of the Faculty of Arts, department of Fine Arts, although the Provost is considering his options the
school appears to have yielded. Can rebranding to Queen's Institute of Technology be far behind?
