By NICK STEWART
A unique program designed to produce business-savvy craftsmen will soon be available to the next generation of fine arts students at North Bay’s Canadore College.
Based on several years’ worth of requests from advisory groups consisting of former graduates, industry professionals and local craftsmen, as well as the need to provide a strong arts and culture component to the college, Canadore is planning to open a full-time Craft and Design program in September 2007.
Subject to provincial approval, the program will offer not only traditional fine arts education in such fields as pottery, jewelry, glassblowing and visual media, but also in the basics of business development and management.
“We’re hoping this will narrow the gap between graduate artists and mass production of their work,” says David Himmelman, dean of Business, Communication Arts, Hospitality, Recreation and Leisure.
“It will help the creation of fine arts to meet with reality, making them viable not just as artists, but as business people.”
Drawing upon the school’s existing business curriculum, Craft and Design students will also be instructed in the economics of production and shipping, as well as the importance of advertising and websites.
Himmelman says this mix of business and art education is unique in Ontario, where the only other full-time fine arts program is at Sheridan College.
“These artists have the opportunity to work for themselves and do incredibly well, and hopefully we’ll help them to achieve that.”
The new program will also require the hiring of an additional full-time faculty member, as well as a number of local experts and a technologist for the 15 students in the first class. Enrolment may increase to 25 students in the coming years.
The use of professional artists as instructors will be a key component, says Keith Campbell, Canadore’s artist-in-residence and fine arts instructor.
“Experience is everything,” he says. “If we as teachers can’t make it as artists, how can we expect our students to do so?”
Campbell has waited 20 years to witness the revival of the school’s full-time arts program, which was initially created in the 1970s, but reduced to a part-time offering in the early 1980s for budgetary reasons.
He says the renewal of the program is necessary to maintain the vitality of the craftsman community, which is being diminished by the aging population.
“People who graduated from our program back when are now starting to retire, and because there hasn’t been any full-time program, there’s been more people leaving the industry than there has been going in,” Campbell says.
Active retirees from other sectors, such as several doctors and nurses, have already told Campbell that they are interested in filling this gap by pursuing the full-time program to develop artistic business opportunities.
He says that craftsmen are crucial to a number of sectors, and scoffs at the public perception that crafts are about macramé and popsicle-stick log cabins. Apart from serving decorative purposes, many fine arts have practical applications in other industries, especially those related to clay.
“Clay is a huge area,” he says. “Artisans working in the field can produce moulds for diverse items such as dinnerware, toilets and urinals. There’s even a more technical aspect to clay, which is built into car engine blocks, hip replacements, computer chips and even the outside of the spaceship Columbia. People don’t truly realize how big an industry it is.”
He says Craft and Design students will draw much from the North’s rich regional heritage. Styles and methods unique to Franco-Ontarian and First Nation art, such as moosehair tufting and the use of bark, will further enhance both the artistic and commercial appeal of graduates’ work.
“We here in the North have so much to offer,” Campbell says. “We should be flaunting our strengths, because the need is definitely there.”
www,canadorec.on.ca
