"That's bullshit," says James Sullivan, division of art chair at SMU's Meadows School of the Arts. "Or it should be." Sullivan, 48, has been shaping the university's art program for 12 years. He is slight, silver-haired, and rumpled, having spent the morning making midterm studio reviews of MFA candidates, assessing their progress, gauging their productivity, nurturing their talent, soothing incumbent frustrations. He's a sculptor himself, working in plaster and straw. He did his undergraduate work in philosophy at Yale, earned an MFA in sculpture at California State University, Long Beach. His three-page résumé enumerates decades of solo and group shows, grants, awards, residencies, and lectures alongside teaching and administrative experience.
Sullivan thinks out loud, doing a quick statistical analysis of what he knows about his past and present students. "I think of the population out there who have graduated in the last 30 years, we've got 30 to 45 percent still working," he says. "Of the MFAs, I know it's more than half." He believes he knows why the art school's track record is better than the norm, even though the young-by-art-school-standards program isn't particularly well-known outside Texas and doesn't elicit the immediate respect that counterparts such as New York City's School of Visual Arts or Los Angeles' California Institute of the Arts would. "It's unusual," he admits. "I think it has to do with the fact that the program has never been huge, and we've always been very selective in what we've done. We've taken care of the people that are here, and the faculty has always been really interested in teaching as well as being artists." The art program is small--12 full-time faculty, 60 undergrads, 10 graduate candidates--and selective. "We choose about 10-15 percent of the people who apply for graduate school," Sullivan says.
Sullivan, along with SMU grad Beth Taylor, former gallery assistant at Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art and current collections manager for local mega-collector Howard Rachofsky, has mounted an unprecedented alumni exhibition on campus at the Meadows Museum as a measure of the art school's success since 1971, when the first MFAs were awarded. It's a first in its scope, and sumptuous in both quality and diversity, and it's a testament to what Dallas can produce and attract to its oft-criticized art scene. Departure/Return showcases current work by 75 former master's and undergraduate students and is distinctive in that none of the work is dated; you cannot distinguish a 1970s-era MFA's painting from a recent grad's. Sullivan says that's how they planned it. "One of our ideas was to say this is all going on now," he says. "We favored juxtapositions of people who were part of the old history of the department hanging right next to people who are graduate students right now."
Departure/Return also serves as a benchmark for the division of art. "We also did it to measure the quality of the program," Sullivan says. "The current contemporary judging of schools has to do with having a very specific identity, so that you know what a Hunter grad's art looks like, or you know what an SVA grad's looks like." Sullivan doesn't see SMU on the same path. "That's more about the school absorbing students rather than reacting and bringing out qualities in the students," he says. "We're interested in bringing out the voice of the students that are here. We don't have predictable blinders on, or try to balance representational art with abstract art, or have a clear preference for certain materials." Sullivan says people were surprised at the exhibition's opening on October 13 when alumnus Yikwan Kim presented a surreal performance piece. "We didn't teach him to do performance art," Sullivan says, "but he had something within him and his experiences here that allowed him to do it."
Kim's wire and wood boxes remain in the center of the Meadows gallery, leftover props from his performance piece. Flanking them, and fighting for attention through its sheer size and dark mood, is David Bates' "Hawkins," a 1991 piece in the artist's signature series of thickly ridged paintings of people and points of interest along the Texas Gulf Coast. Bates and Dallas artist Sam Gummelt represent the kind of artists SMU attracted in the 1970s as well as two of Dallas' top producers and sellers. Other big names from the 1980s and 1990s--Jody Lee, Kaleta Doolin, Julie Bromberg, Lorraine Tady, Nic Nicosia, Dan Rizzie, John Alexander--were selected for the show. Recent graduate Demian LaPlante's elaborate, mirrored construction with video competes with Nicosia's art film, which landed the Dallas native in the Whitney Biennial 2000.
Sullivan says LaPlante recently returned to Dallas from London, where he did graduate work at the Slade School. "One of the things I'm pretty happy with right now is that many of our students, particularly graduate students, are staying in town," Sullivan says. "I think that's something that any city needs. If everybody has to leave to think that they're really making art or making it in the world, that's not good for a city and its identity." Sullivan says the art school's younger graduates are staying, and if they don't stay initially, they're coming back, like LaPlante. "I'd like for more graduates to see Dallas as a viable place to work. If they've gone somewhere else, I'd like to bring them back and infuse this scene."
In a way, Departure/Return's snapshot of the first three decades of SMU's art program is a kind of performance appraisal for Sullivan. He is quietly proud of his accomplishments, but equally proud of the art he makes himself, like his Matter and Meaning show at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi this summer. He's current with the regional scene, and observant. "I see some stylistic affinities cropping up here that will be very good for Dallas," he says. "Right now, between this show, Barnaby at Valley House, Philip Van Keuren down at the MAC, Lorraine Tady opening at Barry Whistler, David Bates at Dunn and Brown, we're well-represented. There are really only 10 or 12 good spaces in Dallas to show in, and right now, there are SMU graduates or faculty in half of them." He believes it is critical to put his art students' achievements in a broader context. "I think this show and the work of our graduates will serve to help this city begin to think of itself a little more as an art center," he says. "I think it never really has."
It's been quiet--too quiet--in the legal wranglings of Talley Dunn, principal of Dunn and Brown Contemporary, against her worthy adversary and former employer Gerald Peters, co-owner of Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art and two galleries in New York and Santa Fe, particularly since the trial date was set for November. Dunn's lead attorney, Dan Hartsfield, says it's been pushed back to February 13, and there has been no movement by either party for a settlement. "There's been very little communication, in fact," Hartsfield says. To recap, Dunn resigned as gallery director after 10 years at Gerald Peters Gallery and sued Peters to break the three-year, no-compete clause in her employment agreement. Dunn opened her own gallery despite the possibility that the Gerald Peters agreement could be enforced. Peters countersued, seeking an accounting and percentage of sales by former gallery artists who left to follow Dunn to Dunn and Brown. The case will be heard in federal court. Hartsfield maintains the no-compete agreement is unenforceable, while Peters, according to papers filed in the counterclaim, believes that The Peters Corporation is entitled to many of Dunn's recent commissions. Dunn's original suit was filed in August 1999; Peters answered and countered in October 1999. Dunn and Brown Contemporary celebrated its first anniversary October 29.
