Every weekday morning, the Hopkins Med Center shuttle sidles up to the curb behind Shriver Hall on the Johns Hopkins University campus. There, waiting in single-file, stands a line of students. They shiver, read textbooks and drink coffee in the brisk morning air. The bright yellow school bus that picks them up is almost always filled to capacity these mornings. Most are students going to work in the vast network of labs at the University's East Baltimore medical campus. But there are some students who seem a bit out of place. They tote unwieldy musical instruments and large portfolios that stick out like neon billboards advertising their destinations. These are the students who take cross-registered music and art classes at other Baltimore schools like the Peabody Conservatory and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Sophomore Dani Simmonds took classes at both of these institutions last year and often found himself the only student on the bus lugging both a guitar case and a painting portfolio. He also found himself fielding a lot of curious questions from fellow passengers. "One guy told me he was a composer at Peabody, a playwright, a pianist and a painter -- he was pretty intense," Simmonds recalls. "He said to me, "Oh a musician and an artist?' To which I replied , "Well aren't all musicians artists?'"
Not necessarily at Hopkins, a school that has never been known for its artistic tendencies. Students like Simmonds are a rare species. In fact, students who take classes in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences are often scoffed at as "Arts and Crafts" majors, forget about fine art. But over the past few years, that mentality has been changing. The biggest indicator of change in the arts programs on the Hopkins campus would be a before and after picture of what the arts facilities here used to look like and what they are today. Painting classes, for example, were once taught in the damp basement of the now-razed Merryman Hall. They are now held in the spacious, window-filled studios of the 53,000 square foot Mattin Center. Today Hopkins offers drama classes where there were none four years ago, a thriving student theatre community, a music minor and a brand new drama minor. There is the Digital Media Center, a lab full of cutting edge computers and the graphic arts, film and audio equipment to go with them. There is a hardwood floored dance studio, an orchestra practice room, photo labs and music practice rooms. But perhaps most significantly, there is a little piece of paper called the Homewood Arts Certificate, which recognizes undergraduates who have devoted their extracurricular time to the arts.
"Things are better," says Craig Hankin, Director of the Hopkins Art Workshops and painting and drawing instructor, "But I think everyone would like to do more. I know I would."
Hopkins students passionate about the arts always had to look beyond the pages of the course selection book for classes to really fulfill their thirst for arts classes. But today, a look at that same book shows that there are now twice the amount of studio art classes offered as there were four years ago. According to Hankin, the waiting lists for these types of classes have dramatically decreased since supplementary courses were added.
"Most art classes very popular. They fill up right away," Hankin says. "It is still a little frustrating for students to get into classes they want, but now the waiting lists have shrunk."
Additional course options have made it easier for students to enroll in the arts classes they are interested in, "But the collateral effect is that more classes stimulate more interest," Hankin explains. "There is a definite snowball effect." Indeed, one the biggest problems the arts at Hopkins have is the huge amount of interest they attract. So when students get turned away, where do they go? Some just hang on for the next semester to roll around. But others take matters into their own hands.
In seeking an arts experience within a larger community that takes art seriously, many Hopkins students have found themselves taking trips across town to other local schools, such as MICA, Peabody, Goucher College and Towson University for the sorts of graphic design, guitar, dance and pottery classes they crave. Cross-registration is a difficult process, pitting students against registrars and academic advisors who will tell them the classes are filled, the deadlines are up, the calendars don't match and that it is very very difficult to fit the course they want into a Hopkins schedule.
They're right, yet a few students each semester persevere against such roadblocks and get the signatures to add just one more to that filled class, ask friends with cars to pick them up from their six hour studio workshops that end at 10 p.m. and show up to campus early after holiday breaks to in order to adhere to their adopted schools' calendars.
Elizabeth Blackford, a sophomore writing seminars/art history double major recently took The Sustained Figure at MICA, a six hour, live-model oil painting class once a week for six hours, and she did it without much help or guidance from anyone at Hopkins. "It was such a hassle to get into it and such a hassle to get back and forth," she says. "You have to register with a special form and get an add/drop once you get in. MICA's course catalog isn't online, and they have one at the registrar but only one copy so you have to sit there and leaf through it." After she was enrolled, she had to figure the rest out herself as well. "Once I got the class I wasn't sure how I'd get there because I assumed there was a direct shuttle, you have to take the shuttle to Penn Station and get out and walk. It ended up taking me awhile to figure it all out, it was really nerve wracking."
Even if Hopkins artists do manage to wheedle their ways behind the canvases, drawing boards and sculpting tables in packed classrooms, be they on the Hopkins campus or on the grounds of a sister school, their class time rarely comes with any distribution credit, making the situation even tougher. How to take a painting or drawing class every semester and manage to graduate on time?
As it stands there is no major, let alone a minor, for the arts on the Homewood campus. Students who wish to show their dedication to the arts on paper have only the Homewood Arts Certificate (HAC) to turn to, a distinction not even included on a final transcript or announced at graduation.
Eric Beatty, who assumed the newly created role of Homewood Arts Director after the construction of the $17 million Mattin Arts Center, points out that Hopkins currently offers music minors for enterprising students who are willing to work independently for the credit and mentions the drama minor that was recently unveiled, but says that fine arts, dance and digital media majors are a long term goal, and aren't going to happen anytime soon. He explains further that the Arts Certificate raises the profile of the arts community on campus, but is not meant to act as a stand-in for a minor.
"We created the certificate thinking we would require a combination of academic and non-academic classes, but after talking to the deans, decided to make it purely extracurricular," he said.
Senior Devra Goldberg, a photographer and one of the first students who will graduate with a Homewood Arts Certificate doesn't understand the logic behind the very distinction that she is slated to receive. "Eric Beatty is really enthusiastic about the final projects, which is fun," says Goldberg, "but I think he is overly optimistic about the Homewood Arts Certificate. Nothing you do in [the Homewood Arts Workshop] class counts towards it, and ultimately it [the HAC] doesn't mean anything, which is important to some kids."
Beatty says faculty and staff can only push so hard for the institution of more arts minors. They need the full weight of the student arts community behind them, which he calls the key to change. "The administration needs to hear from the students," he says, "They listen to them even more than they will listen to staff and faculty." Leah Miller, a junior deeply involved with the campus theatre groups, the Barnstormers and Witness Theatre, agrees. A student member of the Homewood Arts Certificate committee, Miller says that undergraduates should make their voices heard. "Students should be aggressive with their questions and demands," she says.
But are more arts minors really a good idea? These same people who push for a higher profile for the arts say maybe not. "I have friends who are juniors in Brown University's drama department and they are only now finally getting to be leads and primary stage managers," says Miller, "I was a primary stage manager my freshman year here." The problem created by instituting the classes to constitute a minor at Hopkins is that student groups who have a great deal of autonomy would lose their unfettered use of the available facilities which already get booked solid at the beginning of the year and, with that, a great deal of their independence. "There are only two theatres on campus," explains Miller, "Swirnow and Arellano. You would either have to build new facilities or limit the number of productions that student theatre groups put on."
In this way, recognizing the arts with official credit could actually limit the number of students who get to participate. "I put more time into acting than class and of course I would love to get credit for it," says Miller, "but I wouldn't want a minor if it put a lot of restrictions on what student theatre can do." In other words, if more classes equaled better opportunities to pursue the arts, that would be ideal -- but short of another alumni grant on par with the gift made by Christina Mattin to build the arts center, that seems very unlikely.
Until then, the HAC is essentially an acknowledgement of the countless hours a creative student is compelled to spend practicing her art. "It separates the dabblers from the determined," as Miller puts it. But determination has never been a problem, and some students, like junior Cait Murphy, don't think students should have to jump through hoops to prove that they are dedicated to their art. Murphy, a dancer, felt she was misled when she got to Hopkins for an accepted students open house.
"A woman in admissions told me that they had just built a new dance studio and that I would be able to minor in dance," she says. But when Murphy got to campus, she found there was no minor and that the one dance studio didn't allow tap dancing and didn't even have a usable ballet barre. "I had to request that they install a real barre, the one they had was a stand alone one that wobbled," says Murphy. "And I ended up taking my dance classes at a private studio a half hour away."
Are students given the sense that the arts community at Hopkins is more developed than it really is? If you ask Murphy, she'd say yes. Goldberg would tend to agree, "I was definitely misled about the presence of arts on campus," she says, "I thought the Mattin Center was going to be finished and that the public darkrooms that used to be all over campus would be open. They weren't.
And there is no real darkroom in the Mattin Center even now that it's built. They forgot to design one and what we work in now was meant to be a closet and so light streams in during certain parts of day. I also thought it was going to be really easy to take classes down at MICA. It's not. There are only seven people in each photo class, with three sections of Intro and two sections of Basic and if you've done that, there's nothing for you to do. And there's only two teachers, so it's difficult to do an independent study.
Others are perfectly happy with their arts experience at Hopkins. Elana Snow, a sophomore interested in being an art therapist, was able to get into both Painting I and II as a freshman and enjoyed both courses. "There aren't many classes offered so it's hard to progress past a certain point," she says, "but I never painted before coming here so I thought the classes were really good and helped me in terms of discovering technique and seeing color in my subjects. Most of the people I have met here are in awe that I do art at all. I just think that [art types] is not the type of people we attract here unfortunately."
Goldberg goes on to say that although Hopkins may not attract many arty types, when one does show up, that person is often deceived. "They're telling incoming freshmen that it's really easy to get into this stuff around here -- which I heard them say on a campus tour -- and it's not true," she says. "About 100 kids get into the arts program which does not equal easy to get into. Some of the stuff at the Mattin Center is cool, they have loads of practice rooms for music but as far as visual arts goes, it's tough. "
Anne Barber, a matriculated senior who now works as a part-time representative at the Office of Admissions explains her office's official line on the arts at Hopkins. "Prospective students don't tend to ask questions about art," she says. "There's not much demand for it. But when they do, we really talk up the Mattin Center, we mention the Baltimore Museum of Art located right next to campus, we tell them they can take really prestigious classes at MICA and that if there isn't already something they're interested in here on campus, that it's really easy to start your own club."
In college, there is rarely anybody to hold your hand, and JHU, with its "world's first research university" mentality is an especially do-it-yourself type place. Students here are involved in a huge array of projects, internships and senior theses that involve a lot of sweat and tears. A lot that gets accomplished at Hopkins is done so with a by a sense of independence. Why should the arts be any different?
According to Goldberg, there is such a thing as a hurdle set too high. "On a light week I spend 10 hours in the dark room," she says, "I feel frustrated by the whole thing because I really love working on my art and lately I've been trying to tie it into my work in other classes but in a lot of classes I feel like there is too much self-motivation involved. It's nice to have a support network, and there isn't one here.
Blackford agrees that a stronger support network is what the arts at Hopkins need. She was surprised at how difficult it was to take MICA classes.
" But I didn't think about it the right way," she says, "because the big problem with Hopkins is not that the arts are unavailable, because I really like the idea of going to MICA to take classes with art students. The real problem is that because there is no art program at Hopkins, but that once you come back from this [MICA] class there aren't many people who are serious about art on this campus. The single most important thing for artistic development is to be in an environment with people who support it and care about it and think of it as a valid pursuit and I think that is what is lacking here." At the center of the arts-at-Hopkins debate is a newly printed pamphlet designed by Beatty's office that urges readers to "Get into the arts at Johns Hopkins." It features three different flaps, each representing a different branch of the arts: theatre, music and the fine arts, and a fourth panel listing the contact information for various campus arts and cultural programs. Goldberg says, "That pamphlet lists all of this stuff that theoretically exists -- but as a person who tries to participate in the visual arts, I think it is misleading in its overly optimistic tone. It's like when you're making a resume and you pull out every little thing that will count just so it will look like more. "
But maybe there's more out there than what is listed in the pages of pamphlets. Megan Hamilton, a co-founder and the current Program Director at the Creative Alliance, a not-for-profit instrument for the arts in the Baltimore, seems to think so. Hamilton recently came to campus to give a talk in a monthly series called, "Mattin Art Munch", which brings in local artists and speakers to discuss topics from music piracy to documentary filmmaking.
In her talk, Hamilton mentioned a 1992 Peter Walsh installment entitled, "Humor as a Subversive Act: An Exhibition Propagandizing Baltimore Art" as part of the Artscape city festival that year. "The installation posed the theory that in a city like Baltimore where there isn't a strong art market and artists aren't competing with each other for space and galleries to create precious objects to sell to affluent collectors -- it can be a liberating atmosphere," explained Hamilton. "In Baltimore," she adds, "artists have started a lot of the institutions they needed and been very resourceful."
Maybe, she suggests, the key to growth in the arts at Hopkins doesn't have to start and end at Hopkins. Maybe Hopkins art students should reach elsewhere for expansion just as local artists have had to do. After all, there's a big city out there. "As students, you have so much in terms of what your college has to offer," she says. "The Hopkins community is huge, affluent and has a lot of resources. In a way," continues Hamilton, "students should push the envelope and see what they can do with that.
All those things can be really enriched if students are collaborating, booking, looking off campus. Students are in such a treasured place and it's easy to take it for granted. It's easy to see it as a burden, but it's also a huge gift and I think people should just exploit the heck out of it. You've got the resources to cook up whatever you want -so cook!"
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