Visual Art Number Twenty-Three

This is another page from my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project in Brooklyn at The Brooklyn Art Library. I owe a lot to the school where I received my BFA degree. In fact I talk to a group of my former fellow students every week on Zoom. These women all went to Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, had the same teachers, went through the same grueling program.

Moore College of Art and Design was the same school Alice Neel attended. although in her time, the school was called Philadelphia School of Design for Women. When I went to Moore, there was a push to make it coed, but the board made a move to keep it a girls’ school, since the idea (new at the time) was that having men around as fellow students would make us less assertive and less competitive. A feminist idea.

After attending postgraduate classes at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the degree program classes at Atlanta College of Art (now Savannah College of Art and Design) where both schools were coed, I think as a society we were further along in our development and men were not a much of a deterrent. I don’t know if either of those two schools made me less assertive and less competitive. It seemed that in art schools, the teachers were always so “right” in their aesthetic that we as students were subservient anyway.

Back to Alice Neel, now showing in a major solo show in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art went to the same art school as I did. She majored in Painting.