I still remember the first day, sitting in the old gallery listening to Bruce lecture endlessly on what to expect as art students. Everything, down to how you sharpen a pencil, was new. A quiet but talkative, slow-moving, bearded man, he had an adage for every situation. If we tried to protest, he would open his eyes wide and say "ah!" and stop us, somehow compelling us to wait for him to say something, even though half the time he'd just leave his mouth open, as if we were meant to supply the words ourselves. He challenged everything we did, saying, "now do another, do it bigger, make it as big as the Statue of Liberty." I would never again make art without thinking deeply about what I was doing, every step of the way.
The other dominant personality in those days—and he's still there today—was our drawing, ceramics, and printmaking mentor. Mike is no less responsible for my discipline and aesthetic than Bruce. I'll forever picture him, toothpick in his mouth, wild hair, laughing so hard he'd splash his coffee on the floor. At the museums, Mike taught us to see art, dismissively waving away one painting in passing and stopping before another where, animating his whole tall body, he would exclaim with ecstatic praise, "this is art!" Whenever we'd get him to do the same in a critique of our own art work, we'd realize we were not simply creating assignments.
Mike, like other teachers there, is a working artist. Many of the students, too, were local artists developing their craft in what was really more of a workshop environment with us students the apprentices. Studying art at Tri-C East was a unique experience for a Freshman who'd been eighteen for only a month. I was surrounded by students of all ages, from teens like me to artists in their 70s and probably older. I was working with people from other countries and other ethnicities, and it was a huge relief.
The central room was an all-purpose hub. Sometimes we'd have drawing or design classes there. Sometimes we'd meet for lecture or watch the one favorite art film the library owned. Always, we had critiques there. But often it was simply the lunchroom and general hang-out spot, encircled by the other rooms: ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, the wood shop, life drawing, the gallery, and Bruce's office. Here, all the different personalities came together and taught me almost as much as my classes did.
Over in the Main Building, it sometimes felt a bit like high school. More people my age were over there. But in the Interim Building, it was a tangle of humanity ready to teach me things that I couldn't learn from kids my age. Relieved of the stresses of freshman-year-rebellion conformity, I was free to concentrate on creativity. I was at school seven days a week, from morning until night. The only reason I worked was to earn money to buy coffee, gasoline, and guitars.
Within the first couple weeks of school, we had a field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I don't think I realized, until recently, what a gift this museum was. I can trace the core of my aesthetic to my experiences as a young art student seeing shows there. Our destination was an exhibit of New York School Modernist Sculpture.
I was going to ride with Terry. He and I had started together this same quarter. I remember him sitting over by the door of the gallery on the first day of classes and I made a note that he was probably the only male in the class close to my age. He was a muscular guy, and I wondered if he might be a football player, but it turned out he was a weight lifter. We were both taking the same sequence and we quickly paired up in creativity and adventure.
On this day, Terry and I jumped into his light blue Chevette, and, with Alice Cooper playing in the homemade speaker boxes in the back, we zoomed off ahead of the others to the museum. Since we beat the rest of the class, we walked through the show on our own. Everything was so strange and seemed so silly. We made fun of all the sculptures saying "that's not art!" Then we returned to the lobby just as our instructor, Margaret, arrived with the class.
As Margaret guided us through the exhibition, she showed us the work in ways I never saw art before. At each sculpture, when she finished opening our eyes, Terry and I would look at each other, dumbstruck. That night, as I pulled into the driveway at home, I hit the brakes and jumped out. My parents had decided that very day to take all the old bicycles from the garage and put them at the curb for the trash collection. It was a pile of wheels, and spokes, and pedals and it resonated instantly. Two days later, Terry and I had a large-scale bicycle sculpture assembled and spray-painted silver on the lawn outside the art rooms. When we arrived at our Fundamentals of Art class, the other students came in with their found-object sculptures in their arms and placed them on the tables. Margaret had to go outside to see what Terry and I had made.
We titled it Birth, as a joke, mostly because Wading Antelope didn't seem to fit. Margaret, of course, found ways that it evoked birth, and, in a real way, it was a birth for us.
The sculpture went on to be exhibited in the Main Building and the school newspaper wrote an article about us. Some twenty years later, I ran into Margaret at an opening reception for one of her shows, and I reminded her who I was. She remembered me and the art vividly and introduced me to the people around us as one of the guys who created this amazing sculpture composed of hundreds of bicycle parts.
